1.10 Characteristic Ways of Speaking within the Team

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Do curso por University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

90 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

90 ratings

Curso 1 de 5 em Specialization Culture-Driven Team Building

Behind the success and failure of teams lies team culture. But what exactly is culture? How and why does it contribute to success and failure? In this course, you learn how to recognize aspects of team culture of which most people are typically unaware. It is often these seemingly unimportant aspects that have the greatest effect on the outcomes of group tasks. Your recognition of them enables you to form, join and lead teams more effectively. You also come to appreciate the role of ritual and symbols in the daily operation of teams, as well as in situations of change and crisis. Knowledge of the ideas and information in this class enables you to be a better team player and a more effective team leader.

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Why Culture Matters in Organizations

In this unit, we will begin by defining the "team" and then proceed to explore what enables teams to function, the role that culture plays in every team, and how "habitus" and "cultural fit" could affect our performance in specific teams.

1.1 Introduction1:33

1.2 What are Teams?5:15

1.3 A Closer Look at Culture4:59

1.4 Culture as Cultivation6:15

1.5 Being Unaware of Culture4:34

1.6 Expectations and Realities3:56

1.7 The Little Cultural Things that Matter6:05

1.8 Culture Shock5:35

1.9 Habitus4:23

1.10 Characteristic Ways of Speaking within the Team5:12

1.11 What We Say Versus What We Do5:19

1.12 Hiring and Cultural Fit4:18

1.13 High Culture5:42

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Greg Urban, Ph.D.
Professor
Anthropology

One obvious way in which people around the world vary is in terms of language.

In fact, there are some 7,000 distinct languages spoken on the planet today,

though fewer than 100 have more than 10 million speakers.

And many languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers.

Obviously, being able to communicate is important to

team success in achieving collective goals through coordinated efforts.

So sharing a common language is crucial.

Even if teams speak the same language as people who are not members of the team,

like a company in America where everyone speaks English.

Nevertheless, the team often develops recognizable ways of speaking.

I've been impressed when working with individual corporations that I often at

first can't follow the details of internal conversations.

There may be acronyms with which I'm unfamiliar, like AOB, meaning at or

better, on Wall Street Banks.

Individuals, places, and operations may be referred to by unfamiliar terms.

And certain phrases with otherwise obscure meaning might frequently pop up.

An anthropologist studying the Motorola corporation back in the 1980s and

90s, heard people in meetings regularly utter the phrase, the dog will eat it.

Motorola was, of course, a pioneer in the cell phone industry.

It was a tech company and then largely run by technical people.

The anthropologist wondered at the meaning of the phrase, but

it eventually became clear to her what it meant.

We technical people will come up with clever inventions, and

no matter what it is, the people will buy it.

Hence, the dog will eat it.

Over time, however, Motorola began to lose market share.

And so, like their competitors, they started paying more attention

to what their customers actually wanted in the way of technology.

At General Motors Company not many years ago, and

maybe still today, executives were regularly saying that automobile makers

ought to keep their brands inside their swim lanes, quote unquote.

That was an expression they had borrowed from the dot com entrepreneurs

of the 1990s.

The jargon expressed the idea that GM's four

major brands should be kept very distinct.

The Chicago Cubs are a baseball team.

If we think of the broader team as including their fans and

supporters, it is evident that they have a recognizable way of speaking.

For example, though the Cubs have not won a World Series in nearly a century,

since 1908, they have die hard fans known as the bleacher bums.

The Cubs are also known among fans as the North Siders

because of the location of their playing field on the north side of Chicago.

A particular player and later coach, Don Zimmerman, became known as the Gerbil,

presumably because of his pronounced cheeks,

which you can see perhaps in these photos, and so forth.

You may not normally think of fans as part of the team in the case of sports, but

in many ways they actually are.

Recall our earlier definition of a team.

We said it was a group of individuals who had to work together, or

cooperate, to accomplish some collective task.

The fans are arguably essential to the accomplishment of a team's

success in sports.

The viewership is, of course, ultimately what supports the team.

Without fans, there would be no team.

But their cheering also contributes to the drive

players have out on the field to win.

So it is natural in many ways that fans, together with players of specific teams,

develop a distinctive habitus, including the words and phrases they know and use.

But also other aspects of habitus like the clothes they wear.

Sporting team logos, or

the names of specific players or player numbers on their clothing, and so forth.

We can regard the team habitus as contributing to the motivational basis for

team success.

Nor is the habitus even of many modern business corporations confined to

the employees of the corporation.

These days, numerous businesses have recognized the importance of their brands.

So that brand loyalists,

who are like a sports team's fans, contribute to the success of corporations.

One of the obvious examples is Apple Computer, known today simply as Apple.

It established a brand following that purchased their products but

also promoted them, especially through the Mac versus PC ad wars.

In the second unit of this course, you will learn more about the range of

phenomena that go to make up the habitus of team culture.

But before we get there, we'll need to talk more about the difference between

what words mean within the team context and

the habitus of a team as embodied dispositions.

This is the subject of our next video,

the difference between what we say and what we do.

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