Team Building 3 - Term Paper Example

However, there are a number of various exercises that help to minimize conflicts and get ready to them (Schellenberg, 1996). One of the best team-building exercises to avoid conflicts is a hands-in exercise that helps to distinguish a workplace incivility. It is entitled Are You Part of the Problem? To do this exercise the participants are to answer eight questions and then analyze the results. The questions are the following ones: 1) Did you pay little attention to the information given by someone else or demonstrate little interest in his/her point of view? 2) Did you make demeaning, derogatory or rude remarks about some person? 3) Did you make any unwanted attempts to draw some person into a discussion of any personal issues? 4) Did you make fun of someone at work? 5) Did you make any religious, ethnic or racial jokes at work? 6) Did you curse someone at work? 7) Did you publicly embarrass some person at work? 8) Did you play a mean prank on someone at work?

It is recommended to do this exercise with all employees in the end of every year. This gives an opportunity to analyze the relationship between people and the probability of conflict situations. It is necessary to prepare the cards with questions for this exercise. Each card should include the above-mentioned questions and a scheme for points. It may be printed the following way: Never Often 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 The employees should choose one point for each question and then draw conclusions.

The results may be the following ones: 8-16 means good organizational citizen 17-31 – careful, one’s mean streak is showing 32-40 – there is a real social porcupine The above-mentioned exercise is also very helpful if it is necessary to find out if there are any personal conflicts at work. It is rather important to do that as such conflicts prevent people from working more successfully. Moreover, according to statistics, there are about four hundred twenty various psychological disorders that may cause conflicts at work.

So, the necessity of the above-mentioned exercise is evident. However, it is not very easy to make it a part of team work. That is why it is also important to create some plan or strategy to apply the exercise and motivate very employee to take an active part in it. Every person should understand that he/she should test his/her disposition to conflict situations at work. I suggest the following plan for applying an exercise suggested above. 1) The first thing to do is to prepare an exercise. So, it is necessary to create cards, print questions and scale for analyzing the results on them.

It is better to use bright colours to make cards, because this will help to establish friendly atmosphere during answering the questions. 2) Then, it is necessary to prepare the employees to the exercise. This cannot be done spontaneously. People should know when and how they will take part in interrogations. Moreover, they should be aware of the purpose and necessity of the things done by them. So, the employees and the one who is in charge of doing an exercise should have a talk in order to capture the people’s attention to the exercise. 3) It is important to deliver a lecture about conflict before doing an exercise.

This will help to understand that it is important to