The positive and negative team behaviour rules management essay

Introduction:

Mustafa Mehemed

6/1/2012

Acknowledgement

It is a great pleasure to thank everyone who helped me write my dissertation successfully . I would never have been able to finish my dissertation without the guidance of my committee members, help from friends, and support from my family. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my lecturer Natalie, for her excellent guidance, caring, patience, and also let me experience the research. I would also like to thank Roza and Judy for guiding my research for the past several months and helping me to develop my background. Special thanks goes to Jane who was willing to participate in my research and motivated me a lot and committee at the last moment. I would like to thank Shynar, who is a good friend and supported when I was need help to proof reading my research. Thanks to Abdel who is my best friend for helping and advising me. My research would not have been finished without their helps. I would also like to thank my parents. They were always supporting me and encouraging me with their best wishes. Finally, I would like to thank to my class mates and flat mates. They were always there cheering me up and stood by my side in the better and worse times.

Contents page

Acknowledgement ……………………………………………………….. 2

Purpose …………………………………………………………………… 4

Research questions………………………………………………………4

Research objectives……………………………………………………….. 5

Background information…………………………………….…………… 5

Literature review………………………………………………………… 6

Research Methods………………………………………………………. 11

Research technique …………………………………………………….. 11

Sampling Method………………………………………………………. 13

Sample technique………………………………………………………. 13

Sample size ………………………………………………………………. 14

Data analysis ……………………………………………………………. 14

Discussion………………………………………………………………… 18

Recommendation………………………………………………………… 19

Conclusion……………………………………………………………….. 20

References… …………………………………………………………….. 22

Appendix…………………………………………………………………. 23

Purpose of the research

The aim of this research is to evaluate the positive and negative team behaviour in the Saipem company, and to analyse the relationship between the team behaviour and performance. The purpose of this research is firstly, to assess if there is any relationship between negative and positive team behaviour and organisational performance. Secondly, to investigate the causes of negative or positive team behaviour among Saipem’s employees. Thirdly, to suggest ways of managing team behaviour effectively so as to avoid conflicts and enhance between employees’ performance. A final purpose is to highlight other factors that may affect the group performance in the company.

Research questions

1) What are the roles of team work in an organisation? 2) What factors influence team behaviour in Saipem company? 3) Is there any relationship between team behaviour and employee performance? 4) How can effective team behaviour from inside and outside the company, be adapted to improve employee’s performance in Saipem?

Research Objectives

1) To identify positive and negative team behaviour in Saipem company. 2) To understand the relationship between team behaviour and employees performance. 3) To recommend ways of improving team performance in Saipem company.

Background information

Saipem history (2010) Saipem is an international company and world leaders in the oil and gas contracting services sector, both onshore and offshore. Saipem is organised into two Business Units: Engineering, Construction and Drilling. Saipem began operating in 1950s as a small company until the late 1960s. In 1969 Saipem started operating offshore in the Mediterranean Sea and then in 1972 in the North Sea. Furthermore, Saipem is part of ENI group ENI is Italian multi-national Oil and Gas company, present in 79 countries, and currently Italy’s largest industrial. In 1990 Saipem carried out an investment plan in order extend their business to include deepwater drilling, deep water field development, pipe lay, leased floating production storage and offloading (fpso), and subsea robotics. Saipem is an international contractor with very strong relationship with their customers in many countries such as West Africa, North Africa, FSU, Central Asia, Middle East, South East Asia and Europe. Saipem employs more than 40, 000 employees with over 110 nationalities. Sustainability report from Saipem (2010) states that Saipem is looking forward to improve its communication with both its internal and external stakeholders. Saipem has many branches in different countries with almost 40, 000 employees from different backgrounds. Saipem is working very hard to motivate its workers to work in teams and to have good interpersonal relationship between them. One of the agendas on company’s portfolio is to train all employees to achieve the company’s goals and lead all employees to become highly qualified for their jobs.

Literature review

” A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable” Katzenbach and Smith, 1993 in Boddy and Paton (2011: 519). Sniezek (2007) state that team is a powerful force in an organisation. In an effective team each member knows that achieving the final result will be dependent on the other members. This means team members should try hard to contribute to achieving team based tasks by helping each other where they can. A key issue in this research is to understand how team or group interact and relate to each other in determining and how successful the team will be at achieving its mission. Some people are helpful and supportive while others are more concerned with getting the work done, so it depends on people’s behaviour as it varies between individuals. However, still others can cause, conflict or dispute within the team due to many reasons such as lack of experience working with people and preparing a team for the group process.” Effective teams, often with the help of skilled team Hackman and Wageman 2005 in Boddy and Paton (2011: 527) ‘ develop working methods, or team processes that help them to accomplish their tasks. These include developing a common approach, understanding categories of communication and observing team practices”. It has been discovered by Philbin (2005) that there are processes inside a team in work place which causes and affects the information development. Also understanding team rules will support the businesses to evaluate essential action and make the right decision. By understanding team rules how it has been influencing, inspiring and activism may help businesses evaluate the possible collective action and consider how these concepts may be better presented into decision-making. Sniezek (2007) suggests that individuals are easily convinced and influenced. Also individuals will be motivated, inspired and influenced by leaders in the group. Moreover, the mannerism in which a small group can act and react to different situations in different ways. This might be a positive aspect of groups; nevertheless, Snienzek (2007) study recommends that based on group dynamics, these strategies of persuasion can have a negative effect among the group on the outside societies. Based on her research findings, a company needs to make sure all the rules and regulations should lead the company to achieve their goals. In addition, there is one method for the entire group to move forward and make improvement, by not to split the majority and minority from each other . Therefore, a group will make progress and achieve their goals. Ran, I. (2006) states that the success or failure of a business is essential for the company to assess and evaluate result of their progress. For a company to be successful, more time should be spend with the employees and managers in order to make sure everything is understandable and clear, because the key points of any organisation success are co-workers and team behaviour. Teams are fundamental part of social life and culture setting, also quality of working habits and how people consider themselves and others; these cultures from different employees widely influence human behaviour. A study by Bishop and Scott (1997) found that all the conflict has significant positive and negative influence on business’ commitment to team work; however, employers assert that co-workers can improve or boost their work if they get involved in decisions making and get a chance to share their thought. Employees will then feel like a part of the organisation and be motivated to work thus creating enormous opportunity for them in the work place. Moreover, they discovered that the successful interaction of individuals depends on communication in the workplace, and when the employees are satisfied with their work, it will lead to a positive effect on team commitment and performance. Managers are capable of raising employee’s commitment by emphasising team work and providing training in team management and cohesion; therefore, will reduce the risk of conflict in each team due to their satisfaction with the companies. The management also need to pay more attention for all stakeholders and expectation issues. Jones (2004) says every organisation has different group of stakeholders, every one of them contribute the work in order to achieve goals and interests of the company. However, each group (stakeholders) has its own goals and interests and it is necessary for the organisation to manage both cooperation and competition between stakeholders. If organisation cannot manage that it will lead to conflict due to different kinds of goals and negative group behaviour. So it is a good opportunity for the employees and very beneficial for the organisation because groups will learn and improve in order to avoid further conflicts. Also Jones (2004) discovers that through conflict organisation can learn and develop better process and it is a chance for the management to make the right decision and adopt better environment from inside and outside of a group. Managers have to deal with situation by identifying the problem first, then examining the cause of this conflict in order to make the right decision for any organisation. To sum up, to improve a team’s effectiveness it is necessary to understand the factors that impact its performance. When employers understand these factors it will be easy for them to decide when and what team development is needed. In order for teams to function effectively they must manage how they work together and how they interact with the rest of the organisation in order to avoid any conflicts.

Research Methods

The research method to be undertaken is qualitative, as the current research objectives are to identify positive and negative team behaviour in Saipem, to understand the relationship between team behaviour and employees, and recommend ways of improving team performance in Saipem company. Those objectives require qualitative research to gather rich data on cause and effect of team behaviour on employee performance and enable probing to gather information on employee recommendation on improving team performance within an organisation. Furthermore, qualitative research methods will enable close communication between the researcher and the respondents which will enable a deeper understanding of the perceptions and recommendations of the organisation’s employees. Saunders et al(2009) Qualitative research is carried out when a researcher wishes to understand meanings, describe and understand experiences, ideas, beliefs and values as underpinned in this research project.

Research technique

Within qualitative research, the chosen research technique most appropriate to answer the research objectives are interview. An interview is a purposeful discussion between two or more people; there are four types of interview used in research semi-structured, structured, in-depth, and group. In this research structured interviews will be very suitable. Bryman and Bell (2011), state that the aim of using structured interview is to ensure interviewees can reply to the questions, interviewers must read the questions in the same order for each interview to gain consistency and reduce variability of questions. There are different types of questions such as closed, closed and ended and fixed choice. Also, there are two types of interviews; standardised and non-standardised. Non-standardised has two types one-to-one and one-to-many so in this research one- to- one very useful because it can use different tolls such as face-to-face. The reasons why it is very valuable to use structured interview because it is easy to get access to the company and interview manager’s face-to face its good opportunities to collect data and information as much as possible. Furthermore, face-to-face interviews will be less costly and time consuming which is essential for this research.” Population are often defining in terms of demography, occupation, geography, care requirement, diagnosis, or some combination of the above” (What’s the population, 2002). As Saipem is an international company with many branches around the world, this research will not be focus on the main head office in Italy but it will be only focus on the London branch. This branch will be selected for research due to its convenience in addition to its multinational demographic of its employees. Managers of Saipem are of interest for this research due to their responsibility of dealing and managing employees.

Sampling Method

According to Saunders et al. (2009), the choice of sampling technique or techniques is dependent on the research questions and objectives. Sampling is the process in which members of the population will be selected to be part of the sample. The sampling method for this research will be probability sampling, where every number of the population has a known and equal chance of being selected (Bryman and Bell, 2011). This sampling method will be chosen as it is possible to obtain a sampling frame of all the managers working in Saipem- London Branch.

Sample technique

In this research the technique will be used is simple random sample as it is the simplest and most basic form of probability sampling. In this technique each unit of the population will has an equal probability of inclusion in the sample (Bryman and Bell, 2011).

Sample size

According to the Saipem website there are 360 employee’s in London branch and about 25 managers, the sample size will be about 10 managers with an equal opportunity in participating in the research. T he reason why chosen 10 managers because of the time consumer which is very important for the researcher and also money if going to be more than ten managers, the cost of this research going to be very high.

Data analysis

This research is designed to highlight positive and negative team behaviour rules in Saipem’s company. Also to give recommendation to Saipem’s management board regards which interview discovered so far. According to the interview that was discussed manager’s opinions and perceptions of Saipem. Moreover, it will focus on the answer research objectives and research questions. The first research objective is the roles of team work in organisation. The main roles of Saipem are divided into three different perceptions. Firstly, the staff has to be treated equally and the management board has to ensure that to give respect to everyone. As respondents states that ” the main roles for Saipem is to make sure all staff must be treated equally and get the same respect from every one”. Secondly, all the employee’s including managers gain equal opportunity such as accommodation Marcllo says that ” also equal opportunities for all managers, supervisor’s, employees and suppliers by having same facilities such as staff canteen, gym, rooms including everything TV mobile”. Saipem has to deal with everything to adopt all staff to work together and avoid any mistakes which can lead to conflicts. These is very important that Saipem has very stringent regulation about discrimination in term of religions, gender and colour so actions of these it will be very serious as managers asserts that ” Saipem has very strict and strong rules about problems and issues with employees such as discrimination.” The decision will be very serious for any one does not follow the roles, as Marcllo states ” if anything happened the decision will be make very strong as disciplinary action which going to be very serious and in some cases it will official warning for those employees who do not follow the roles of the company.” Another objective is the relationship between team behaviour and employee’s performance that Saipem is international company employee’s are must behave in the right way in order to achieve company goals as the responds says ” I manage multi-culture team, I learned and got experience to deal with employees from different back ground because different attitude and behaviour could affect employee’s performance. Therefore, Saipem must follow the roles and regulation to drive the organisation forward.” The employee’s behaviour can lead company to positive and negative aspects as well; managers should make sure how to adapt staff working together and to improve their performance. The team behaviour needs to know how to affect from inside and outside the company, be adapted to improve employee’s performance in Saipem. There are always risks in any business whether is internal or external. In the internal risk when employee’s cannot work together and difficult to be engaged therefore, it will lead to issues as the manager believes that ” there are some internal and external factors might affect Saipem for example such as employees when they do not distribute and work together and are separated from each other.” In order for team work to achieve good results that have to contribute work and share all the knowledge together. Marcllo advises that ” team work has to work to share the information and teach each other any new idea about the work.” Marcllo adds ” this is the main internal affects.” The external factors explained that it is clear creditors and investors always wants to see their capital increases and benefit from it. The manager states that ” investors only want to gain money from their investment” not only this factor but also other factors such as instability in many countries, and some countries ruling by militaries might be problem to deal with. Marcllo mentioned that ” Saipem has some issues which is affecting the company such as environmental conditions and instability of government for example in Nigeria”. It is part of company responsibilities’ to work with employees and local communities to adapt good environment and decrease the risks. Marcllo discussed that ” Saipem working very hard with local communities in each country to reduce the risks, Saipem sponsors for almost 230 students in local community in Nigeria to help all those students for many things.” Factors might influence team behaviour is one of the research objectives as well. There are many factors that influence team behaviour, for instance motivation is one of the most important in work place that managers and companies motivate employee’s to achieve a better results. Marcllo describes that motivations play very significant roles in work place that ” there are several motivations to motivate employees to drive the company forward by offering them courses and training during the work and this is free charge.” This is not for achievement but also to progress themselves and study new skills as manager states that ” the reason for that to give the staff opportunities to learn and develop themselves and get new skills as well”. Also another influence to encourage co-worker to work a broad and the reasons behind that to get used to how to work with employee’s from different back ground. Marcllo stated that ” another chance for employees to work abroad to develop their careers so it will be good motivation to learn and understand other branch doing. Good motivation for new co-worker to gain and understand their jobs before they stated that the good things as manager says ” there are special programs for young graduated long courses and training to be able to understand everything before they start”.

Discussion

One of the rules in team work is organisation to achieving the goals. Sniezek (2007) believes that company needs to make sure all the regulations should lead the company to achieve their goals. Moreover, Marcllo states that the support of Sniezek ” follow the rules and regulation and drive the organisation forward.” Snizek (2007) demonstrates that individuals are easily influenced by motivation and this factor can influence employees. This was supported by Marcllo (interviewee) states that employee’s need motivation ” about motivation there are several motivations to motivate employees to drive the company forward by offering them courses and training during the work and this is free charge”. Jones (2004) suggests that all the organisations must manage and guide all employees’ to avoid any conflicts due to group behaviour and this can affect team from inside and outside the company. Marcllo was in favour of adopting all the staff to work together (interviewee) Marcllo demonstrates that ” Saipem has to deal with everything to adopt all staff to work together and avoid any mistakes which can lead to conflicts.” Scot (1997) asserts that managers are capable of raising employees’ commitment by emphasising team work and providing training this can be good influence for employees’ and their relationship which related to the research objectives as Marcllo supports ” that there are special programs for young graduated long courses and training to be able to understand everything” In (2010) Sustainability report from Saipem states that looking forward to improve its communication, in both the internal and external which lead to improve team performance and identify positive and negative team behaviour. Furthermore, Marcllo agrees that ” Saipem working very hard with local community in each country”. To avoid any affect for the company.

Recommendation

According to this study and implemented interview the teams behaviour rules are very important in Saipem as the results from this research employees’ have to work together to gain a good communication, motivation, achievement, cohesiveness, development and enjoyment, in order to be successful. This report recommends managers encourage employees to work in group to achieve well results and drive the business in the right direction. Moreover, managers should make sure all employees’ have ability to work together and engaged in order to avoid any conflicts in the future. Also this research recommends managers to improve team performance, by giving them advises and encourage them to work together in order to drive the business forward.

Conclusion

Group’s behaviour is becoming an important aspect for any business rules and plays a very significant role. The purpose of this research was to assess if there is any relationship between negative and positive team behaviour and organisational performance. According to Marcllo Saipem needs to work very close with employees’ to adapt employees’ to distribute and work together this in term of internal factor. The company of external factors must to ensure that before starting any project there is a good environment conditions and stability of government to avoid any mistakes that might happen. Also, Saipem is multi-culture and has many staff from different back grounds. Therefore, managers should make sure all the staff follow the rules and have good relation with each other. This research strongly advises managers to work hard and adapt employees to work together in order to avoid any conflicts between them. In addition to ensure that all employees follow the regulations to lead the company in the right direction. Finally to encourage and influence employees and make sure that there are good relationship between each other and are able to work together.

References

Bishop, J and Scott, K. (1997) How commitment affects team performance – employee commitment [online]. Available from: file:///C:/Users/Mustafa/Desktop/5How%20commitment%20affects%20team%20performance%20%20employee%20commitment%20%20%20HR%20Magazine%20%20%20Find%20Articles. htm (Accessed: 12 March 2012). Boddy, D and Paton, S. (2011) Management an introduction, 5th ed. London: Financial Times Prentice Hall. pp. 527. Bryman, A and Bell, E. (2011) Business Research Methods, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press Inc. Jones, G. (2004) Organisational theory, design, and chance, 4th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Education International. pp. 430-433.. Philbin, J. (2005) Strategic decision- making. Group behaviour, and public relations strategies, PhD. thesis, Maryland: University of Maryland. Ran, I. (2006) Management system, human behaviour and business excellent. Working paper on Pakistan’s 10th International Convention on Quality Improvement. November 27-28. Lahore, Pakistan. Saipem history, Available at http://www. saipem. com/site/Home/Company/History. html (Accessed: 1 April 2012)Saipem Lancaster Group, (2010) ERSAI. Sustainability Report. Available at: http://www. saipem. com/site/Home/Sustainability. html (Accessed: 12 March 2012). Saunders, M., Lewis, P. and Thornhill, A. (2009) Research methods for business students, 5th ed. Harlow: FT Prentice Hall. Sniezek, S. (2007) How groups work: a study of group dynamics and its possible negative implications [online]. Available at: file:///C:/Users/Mustafa/Desktop/3How%20Groups%20Work%20%20A%20Study%20of%20Group%20Dynamics%20and%20its%20Possible%20Negative%20Implications%20%20%20Serendip’s%20Exchange. htm (Accessed: 12 March 2012).