4.8 Learning review

Richard was taking a marketing class at his university. At the end of the semester, the course participants were asked to divide into teams of three students with the goal of assessing the attractiveness of a specific fictional product (a car accessory) devised by the professor. In order to conduct this market research, Richard was to work together with Gaoya, who was an international student from Singapore, and Mohammed, who had a British background like himself. They were given four days to complete their project and were then to present their results to the class the following week.

The team quickly came to the conclusion that the best way to finish this assignment was to go out and ask people about their feelings towards the new product. The first task they set for themselves was to establish which questions to ask. At the beginning there was a lot of disagreement. Gaoya seemed to be excellent at coming up with ideas, but in Richard´s opinion did not adequately think through whether these questions would actually deliver the results required in the limited time available. Richard took on the task of proofreading the survey questions, making sure that the language and vocabulary employed were unbiased and likely to elicit an open answer. Mohammed did not come up with many ideas of his own, but made sure the team was focussed and did not waste their time on endless discussion of details.

The next task was to find people they could interview. There was little time, and since they thought they needed at least 20 interviews in order to have representative results, Gaoya suggested that they should simply go to any busy shopping mall and start asking people until they had enough results. A 'lively discussion' erupted, as Richard thought that his would just waste their time. His approach would have been to sit down with a plan and consider which people they might want to interview, and where they could best find these people. After all, not all of the people in the shopping mall would even own a car. After a heated discussion between Richard and Gaoya, Mohammed tried to refocus the discussion on the task at hand. The resulting decision ended up being a mixture of both approaches, as they decided to go to the local cinema in the evening, where films for mature audiences were playing, to make sure that they would find as many people as possible of driving age. At the cinema Gaoya found it easiest to simply approach people, whereas Richard was more hesitant.

The third part of the project was to prepare and conduct the presentation. Richard made sure the presentation style and data was in great shape, but he seemed to be nervous about the presentation itself. Mohammed, who observed this, suggested that Gaoya should take on the largest part of the talking as she really seemed to enjoy it and was also good at it. Richard and Mohammed presented the visual results and numbers.

Even though the team went through some heated discussions, the final result earned them a great mark which left all three of them very happy.

In your learning journal, answer following questions for each of the three team members:

1. What were the strengths of Richard, Gaoya and Mohammed? What were their weaknesses?
2. What do you believe was their respective Belbin team role?
3. What could have been the consequences for the team if Richard's competencies had not been there to support the effort? How about Mohammed's, or Gaoya's competencies?