Discuss the benefits and limitations of communicating with e-mails among team members.

E-mail communication has benefits because messages can be quickly written, edited and transmitted to teams of any size. However, team members may not capture the emotional tone of the message in absence of being able to read the facial expressions and other non-verbal cues. For ambiguous, complex and novel situations, emails can provide an opportunity to write things people would find difficult to communicate in face-to-face conversations. It may allow time to team members to think over issues and then react. For new teams, email conversation may create misunderstandings but as teams get mature, email conversations may actually help in avoiding conflicts, clarifying situations in and resolving them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“All decisions are ethical decisions.” Comment on this statement, particularly by referring to the concepts of moral intensity and moral sensitivity.

This sweeping statement is false. In other words, not all decisions are having equal right/wrong or good/bad dimensions. We are saying there is a threshold which defines ethical concern, and it is a function of moral intensity and moral sensitivity. For a decision to have an ethical dimension, i t has to have some moral intensity associated with it. Moral intensity is a characteristic of the situation. It refers to the degree to which an issue demands the application of ethical principles. “Who should be laid off?” would have high moral intensity. On the other hand, a decision to take an umbrella to work because it might rain has no moral intensity. This is because morally intense issues involve others in the society who may think the decision is good or evil, or the issue quickly affects people. Moral sensitivity refers to a characteristic of the decision maker, not the situation. Faced with the same issue, two decision makers may be more or less moral sensitive, depending on emp...
Read more

After hearing a seminar on organizational learning, a mining company executive argues that this perspective ignores the fact that mining companies could not rely on knowledge alone to stay in business. They also need physical capital (such as digging and ore processing equipment) and land (where the minerals are located). In fact, these two may be more important than what employees carry around in their heads. Evaluate the mining executive’s comments.

This question relates to the importance of organizational learning perspective in achieving organizational effectiveness. Meanwhile, the question emphasizes the critical understanding that organizational effectiveness is a function of an overall holistic system view of the effective and efficient interplay of all three elements of software (the knowledge and processes), hardware (the structures and the people) and the harmonious relationship between the organization and its environment. Focusing on any one component at the expense of the rest would definitely result in incomplete picture of an effective organization. Some executives still view land and capital as a company’s most valuable assets . They give lip service to the idea that “People are our most value assets” but still don’t understand that land and capital have little value without people . For instance, this mining company would not have found land with ore deposits unless it had the knowledge to find those minera...
Read more

Is it possible to have a knowledge of what an organizational culture is before you become a part of the organization? How important is it for you to align yourself with your organizational culture?

Organizational culture is artifacts and shared values and assumptions. Artifacts may be observable before you become a part of the organization but the shared organizational values and assumptions are the intangibles and difficult to decipher before you become a part of it. It is important to align with the organizational culture because it represents the way things work in the organization. Organizational culture acts as the control system, the social glue and sense making. Any violation of what is shared by members of an organization is likely to create alienation for a new member.
Read more