MGT/312 Week 3: Groups and Teams in Organizations, sample paper

Nobody Mentioned the Supplier Warning: Psychological Safety, Team Design and a Missed Signal on a Pet Food Manufacturer's Recall Readiness Team

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

MGT/312: Organizational Behavior for Managers

Week 3 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The company, team and events are a composite written for a model paper.

A composite pet food manufacturer with two plants formed a recall readiness team to reduce the risk of contaminated products reaching stores. The team has seven members: the quality assurance manager, who chairs it, and representatives from procurement, production, maintenance, regulatory affairs, customer service and logistics. It meets every two weeks. In March, a grain supplier emailed the procurement representative, a newer employee, saying that a batch of corn it had shipped might contain elevated levels of a mold toxin, and that testing was underway. The representative mentioned it to no one at the next meeting. Two weeks later, the supplier confirmed the problem, and the company had to hold and test finished product from three production days, costing about $280,000 and delaying shipments. No product reached consumers. When asked why she had not raised the warning, the representative said, "It wasn't confirmed, and I didn't want to be the one who shut down the line over a maybe." This paper analyzes why.

Group or Team?

Organizational behavior distinguishes groups, whose members share information but whose results are the sum of individual contributions, from teams, whose members share a goal and are mutually accountable for results (Robbins & Judge, 2022). The recall readiness team was designed as a team but operated as a group. Members reported on their own areas in turn, the chair assigned follow-up items to individuals and the team had no shared measures of its own performance. No one felt responsible for spotting risks outside their own area.

Composition and Roles

The team's composition was sound on paper: each function that touches a recall was represented. But composition includes status, and status differences were large. The quality manager and production representative had decades of experience; the procurement representative had been at the company eight months. Roles were not defined beyond each member representing a function. No one was assigned to gather and review supplier notices, and the procurement representative did not know that unconfirmed warnings were within the team's scope.

Norms

Norms are shared expectations about how members behave. Observation of the team's meetings, and interviews with members afterward, revealed three norms. First, members reported only confirmed problems; raising possibilities was seen as alarmist. Second, production concerns carried great weight, and anything that might stop a line was treated with skepticism. Third, the chair ran meetings from a fixed agenda with little open discussion. None of these norms was written down, but newer members learned them quickly.

Psychological Safety

Edmondson (1999), studying 51 work teams in a manufacturing company, found that psychological safety, the sense members share that they will not be embarrassed or punished for speaking up, went along with learning behavior such as asking questions, seeking feedback and discussing errors, and that learning behavior was in turn associated with team performance. Where psychological safety was low, members kept concerns to themselves to avoid looking ignorant, incompetent or disruptive.

The recall readiness team showed the signs of low psychological safety. The procurement representative feared that raising an unconfirmed warning would make her look alarmist and that stopping production would be blamed on her. Other members later admitted that they, too, sometimes held back concerns until they were certain. The team's norms, which rewarded confirmed facts and treated production stoppages as failures, made silence the safe choice for any individual even though it was the risky choice for the company.

Leadership

Edmondson's research also showed that team leaders shape psychological safety through how they respond to questions and bad news. The chair, an expert in food safety, was respected but formal. When members raised problems, the chair's first question was usually whether they were sure. That question, meant to encourage accuracy, signaled that uncertain concerns were unwelcome.

Recommendations

Hackman (2002) argues that teams succeed when they have a compelling direction, an enabling structure of tasks, roles and norms and a supportive organizational context, and that leaders do most of their useful work by setting up those conditions rather than by managing each meeting. The recall readiness team lacked a clear direction for uncertain risks and a structure that assigned them to anyone. Four changes would help the team work as a team and make speaking up safe.

Redefine the team's purpose and scope in writing: its job is to detect and respond to risks early, including unconfirmed signals. Add a shared measure: the time from first signal to team review.

Assign roles clearly, including a member responsible for collecting all supplier notices, customer complaints and test anomalies each week, regardless of confirmation.

Change the meeting structure. Begin each meeting with a round in which every member names one possible risk, confirmed or not, and have the chair respond to each with thanks and a question about next steps rather than whether the person is sure.

Model fallibility. The chair should share examples of the chair's own early concerns that turned out to matter and ones that did not, and the team should review the corn incident openly as a system failure rather than an individual one.

What the Organization Must Do

The team does not operate alone. Plant leaders reward production output, and a line stoppage appears on the monthly report as lost volume. As long as stopping a line for a possible risk looks like a failure in the plant's own measures, team members will hesitate. Senior leaders should state publicly that holding product for testing on a credible warning is the right decision even when the warning proves false, and the plant's reports should record such holds separately from unplanned downtime.

Measuring Improvement

The team should track the number of unconfirmed signals raised at each meeting, the time from signal to review and the results of a short psychological safety survey of members every six months. An increase in raised signals, even ones that turn out to be nothing, would indicate that the climate is improving.

Conclusion

A supplier warning went unmentioned because the recall readiness team operated as a group rather than a team, with undefined roles, large status differences and norms that discouraged raising uncertain concerns. Research on psychological safety explains why individuals stayed silent even when speaking up was in the company's interest. Redefining the team's purpose and roles, restructuring meetings and changing how the leader responds to bad news would make speaking up the expected behavior.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2022). Organizational behavior (19th ed.). Pearson.