Teams, Team Process, and Team Building

This chapter examines what is involved in creating effective teams first by differentiating between work units and teams, examining team processes, understanding how and when teams can contribute to a more effective organization, and discussing how to select and develop the best team members, develop effective team leadership, and motivate team performance. It examines some of the latest developments and challenges in teams, including virtual and global teams. The group process model says that the sum of the individuals’ potential plus process gain minus process loss equals group effectiveness. The chapter describes the situations in which teams can be productive and those in which they cannot. It is important for employees to understand how their tasks contribute to the success of others’ tasks and what the successful performance of these tasks means to the organization. Team members should be selected based on either possessing technical skills, problem-solving and decision-making skills or interpersonal skills, or having a strong aptitude for their development. The chapter explains the importance of training with respect to teams, distinguishes between task-related training and team-related training, and helps the reader to understand the concept of team building. Successful team leaders know that team performance comes from collective effort and action. Goal-setting theories suggest that goals can improve performance because they generate, direct, and sustain effort. The chapter explains how to evaluate team and team member performance, and emphasizes individual performance in terms of contribution to the team

How Team Familiarity Mitigates Negative Consequences of Team Composition Disruptions: An Analysis of Premier League Teams

In today’s dynamic work environment, teams are increasingly confronted with disruptions. While there are different types of disruptions that teams face, we contend that team composition disruptions that occur during the completion of a team’s task can be especially challenging. We also argue that it is important to consider different types of team composition changes as they create different demands for team adaptation. Specifically, we assess the effects of loss of a team member and change in team membership resulting from injury substitution. We examine how these two types of team composition disruptions impact coordination and team outcomes (i.e., goals scored) by leveraging data from 2,280 soccer games in the English Premier League. We found that team member loss impaired both team coordination and outcomes while team member substitution only impacted team coordination. Moreover, we build upon and extend existing research that has examined team familiarity by distinguishing between familiarity that is built amongst members on the current team (i.e., current team familiarity) and familiarity that has developed as a result of members working together in prior teams (i.e., prior team familiarity). This distinction appears important as we did not find evidence of a main effect of prior team familiarity on coordination but found evidence of a reversing curvilinear effect of current team familiarity on coordination. Finally, the indirect effect of team member loss on team outcomes through team coordination was more pronounced when teams had low (compared to high) prior team familiarity

Predicting Successful Introduction of Novel Fruit to Preschool Children

Background: Few children eat sufficient fruits and vegetables despite their established health benefits. The feeding practices used by parents when introducing novel foods to their children, and their efficacy, require further investigation. Objective: We aimed to establish which feeding strategies parents commonly use when introducing a novel fruit to their preschool-aged children and assess the effectiveness of these feeding strategies on children’s willingness to try a novel fruit. Design Correlational design. Participants/setting Twenty-five parents and their children aged 2 to 4 years attended our laboratory and consumed a standardized lunch, including a novel fruit. Interactions between parent and child were recorded and coded. Statistical analyses performed Pearson’s correlations and multiple linear regression analyses. Results: The frequency with which children swallowed and enjoyed the novel fruit, and the frequency of taste exposures to the novel fruit during the meal, were positively correlated with parental use of physical prompting and rewarding/bargaining. Earlier introduction of solids was related to higher frequency of child acceptance behaviors. The child’s age at introduction of solids and the number of physical prompts displayed by parents significantly predicted the frequency of swallowing and enjoying the novel fruit. Age of introduction to solids and parental use of rewards/bargaining significantly pre- dicted the frequency of taste exposures. Conclusions: Prompting a child to eat and using rewards or bargains during a positive mealtime interaction can help to overcome barriers to novel fruit consumption. Early introduction of solids is also associated with greater willingness to consume a novel fruit.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

SolarFocus: A Solar Tracking and Reflecting System

Final report and team photo for Project 25 of ME450, Winter 2009 semester.This project aims to develop a simple, scalable, and low-cost motorized mirror system for the G.G. Brown building renovations at the University of Michigan. The mirrors will be directed by a light-sensing control system to track and reflect solar energy. The sunlight will be reflected into the North-facing windows of G.G. Brown – windows that do not normally receive direct sunlight. Each square meter of mirror can provide up to 1000 watts of energy, thereby displacing the equivalent fossil fuel usage and emissions. After piloting this technology in new G.G. Brown building, it can be generalized to residential and commercial applications.Peter Woolf (Chemical Engineering, U of M)http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62477/2/ME450 Winter2009 Team Photo - Project 25 - Solar Tracking and Reflecting System.jpghttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62477/1/ME450 Winter2009 Final Report - Project 25 - Solar Tracking and Reflecting System.pd

Steps Towards Satisficing Distributed Dynamic Team Trust

Defining and measuring trust in dynamic, multiagent teams is important in a range of contexts, particularly in defense and security domains. Team members should be trusted to work towards agreed goals and in accordance with shared values. In this paper, our concern is with the definition of goals and values such that it is possible to define 'trust' in a way that is interpretable, and hence usable, by both humans and robots. We argue that the outcome of team activity can be considered in terms of 'goal', 'individual/team values', and 'legal principles'. We question whether alignment is possible at the level of 'individual/team values', or only at the 'goal' and 'legal principles' levels. We argue for a set of metrics to define trust in human-robot teams that are interpretable by human or robot team members, and consider an experiment that could demonstrate the notion of 'satisficing trust' over the course of a simulated mission

Constitution d'un corpus de dialogue oral pour l'évaluation automatique de la compréhension hors- et en- contexte du dialogue

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale.International audienceThis paper presents and reports on the progress of the EVALDA/MEDIA project, focusing on the recording protocol of the reference dialogue corpus. The aim of this project is to define and test an evaluation methodology that assess and diagnose the contextsensitive understanding capability of spoken language dialogue systems. Systems from both academic organizations (CLIPS, IRIT, LIA, LIMSI, LORIA, VALORIA) and industrial sites (FRANCE TELECOM R et D, TELIP) will be evaluated. ELDA is the coordinator of the Technolangue/EVALDA multicampaign evaluation project, a national initiative sponsored by the French government, of which MEDIA is a sub-campaign. MEDIA began in January 2003. VECSYS provides the recording platform for the project