PRODUCTION GAME

Paper details:

The Production Game provides a rich, first-hand experience that reveals a wide array of individual, team and organisational issues. These include sense-making, group dynamics and high performance teams, decision-making and stress. A theme that runs through several of these topics concerns team resilience – what does the Game teach us about how organisations gather and process information from their environments, develop a division of labour and mechanisms to coordinate this and sustain activity in the face of trying conditions? After the Game you will be provided with objective data on the performance of each team, plus diagnostic information from the survey that we will collect before and after the Game. This information gives a unique opportunity to explore the connections between organisational processes and outcomes, based on the performance and approach of your company compared to those of the other companies in the Game. In your individual report you must use ideas from the OB course to analyse and explain why your company experienced the outcomes that it did. Where appropriate, you should use the performance and questionnaire data provided, both for your own company and for the others in the Game, to inform your analysis. Although much of your analysis will be of your own team, you should also draw comparison with others, particularly the highest and lowest performers. Your report should cover the following points: 1) How your team performed, both in absolute terms and relative to the other teams (10%) 2) Using ideas and concepts from the OB course, analyse the reasons for your team’s performance. You should use ideas from any three of the following areas covered during the course: a) The interplay between strategy and organisation, trade-offs b) The role of narratives in shaping behaviour c) Sense-making d) Group dynamics and processes e) Decision-making (20% per part for each of three parts, 60% in total) 3) What are the key attributes that explain the differences in performance between the highest and lowest performing teams? What do these teach us about how to build effective, resilient teams and organisations? (30%).