Do you know of any (generic but realistic) published team task that can be done through virtual synchronous communication in 20 minutes or less and that we could use with (graduate) management students (under different communication conditions) to assess the impact of different communication modes on task performance?
In other words: is there a team assignment that you could recommend where a team of 3-6 people has to communicate (online or in real-life) to achieve an objective together (such as reach a consensus, make a decision, or come up with a plan)?
Many thanks for any references or links to such communication-intensive team tasks that can be used for in-class experiments.
one task that comes up often in work is the need to supply customers with answers in near real-time. A help desk person (or customer success manager as they are sometimes called today) gets a question from a customer. The help desk person initiates a chat or email with a product manager and a post-sales support engineer who need to weigh on as to whether the request is a new feature request, a reported bug, or some other category. Often product specialists need to be brought in to resolve the request.
The task I have used before is the Foundation Task, published in a paper by Watson et al in MIS Quarterly 1988, Vol 12, pp 463-478. The task involves a resource allocation decision and it is really excellent. However, it is designed for a 60-min discussion.
There is also a repository of tasks published somewhere, but I would need sometime to find it for you.
You can do a teamwork exercise in which students are ask to identify the characteristics they would like to see in group members they have to work with in a group. They collate all the characteristics and determine which ones matter the most to the team members. They results usually show that students favor attitudinal characteristics (e.g., commitment, integrity, and respectfulness) over intellect and skill levels. The latter is then captured and posted online for students to see before undertaking group assignments.
Best regards,
Debra
Thank you all! I did find the task repository Alberto, thanks! It can be accessed here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/14355/ISWorld%20Task%20Repository.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
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