Henry Tam and the Mgi Team Case - Main Managerial Problem

Henry Tam and the MGI Team Case - Main Managerial Problem

On the surface, the seven-member MGI team which comprised of Henry Tam and Dana Soiman – both current HBS MBA Students, Alex Sartakov – a Berklee College of Music student, Dav Clar – a MIT graduate student, and Alexander (Sasha) Gimpelson, Igor Tkachenko, and Roman Yakub – the MGI founders, seems like an ideal team, with each member bringing different experiences and technical skills to help with the business plan contest at HBS. However, as we will see in this paper, interpersonal dynamics, a lack of clear leadership, resulting in unclear team goals and individual roles, and a lack of healthy group norms, contribute to an ineffective team process at MGI. With the deadline less than three weeks away and the team without even a first draft of the business plan, Henry is certain that the team would not meet the deadline if it continued to function as it had so far.

Case Analysis

Team Process is defined as the team members’ behaviors and interactions, occurring over time. It is through this process that all of the members’ expertise and knowledge, along with other inputs, functioning in the group environment, manufacture an output. MGI’s team process seems ineffective, resulting a lot of conflicts among the subgroups of the MGI team and inability to complete the business plan. At the “launch” of the team in Mellon Hall on HBS campus, it was clear that the team did not have any specific role for each of the team members, nor was there a clear leadership arrangement. “..It seemed to me that Sasha saw our role as business plan writers, specifically for the contest, whereas Igor understood the need for us to help with vision and strategy.” As a result, we see different expectation of roles and frustration among members. Added to problem during the launching process, other team members were added over next couple of meetings without any prior consultation of the team: Alex joined at the 2nd meeting and Dav joined at the 3rd meeting. This seeded an element of distrust in Henry and Dana and made them wonder whether Sasha needed actual team members, or the team members’ connections to the business plan contests. It is important to monitor how team members interact with one another at the very beginning of the team formation, as this sets the trajectory of team process. As the case details, the behavioral integration at each of the three components - quantity and quality information exchange, collaborative behavior, and joint decision-making - seems poor. We see that it is apparent that the information was not shared equally from the way that the 2 newest members of the team were added to the group. From the case, we also see examples of bad collaborative behavior between Sasha and Dana. In the second meeting, I feel that Sasha may have shown a little of the relationship conflict when he thought that Dana did not know what she was talking about and that what she said was bullshit. This may have stemmed from a task conflict from the prior meeting where Dana insisted that Sasha was wrong to believe cold-calling by a current student was more receptive by alumni. It seems that the team did not discuss setting healthy norms, including how to resolve conflicts and create an effective decision-making process. Their current norms were not valued the same to each team members. The lack of a sound team process resulted in no written business plan with the deadline less than three weeks away.

The root causes of the MGI’s team process problem are poor team design, subgroups dynamics, and a lack of formal leadership to guide through the team process. At the team design stage, task complexity and task interdependence were not considered thoroughly. The task is to write a business plan for MGI. From the case, we see that new members were added at the 2nd and 3rd meeting – an indication that the complexity of the task and how it should be divided to sub-tasks and the degree of interdependence of the sub tasks were not properly considered when building the MGI team. Formal roles based on suitability were not defined and each meeting seemed to get nowhere. The team seemed to be divided into subgroups even at the first meeting. “To Henry, it had seemed that group was developing a confrontational stance of �Dana and me versus the Russians’” . The subgroups were Henry and Dana whose main purposes were to write the HBS business plan, three Russian founding members of MGI, and Dav, Sasha, and Igor who worked on the technical aspects of product design and paten application. There was no integration among the subgroups, formally or otherwise. Lastly, there was no clear leadership in the group who could help create an environment where interactions between team members