Ethical Teams

Introduction and Alignment

Just as individuals can be influenced to adhere to a high ethical standard, or pulled to a lower standard, teams of individuals are also similarly influenced. In addition, teams have their own challenges and concerns. This workshop will introduce you to the problems and challenges of creating high-performance teams while also building an ethical environment; this knowledge will better able you to lead high-performance teams within an ethical environment.

Upon completion of this assignment, you should be able to:

• Develop an ethical culture for team performance.

Resources

• Textbook: Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership
• Textbook: Essentials of Business Ethics
• File: Chapter 8.ppt
• Media: Organizational Culture

Background Information

Workplace teams have become quite common in today’s global environment. Teams often bring together people with differing skills, knowledge, culture, and increasingly, language. This diversity can promote innovation and creativity. However, this very diversity can create challenges to performance through misunderstanding, confusion, lack of clarity in roles, responsibilities, or even agreement as to the “right” course of action. This assignment explores some of the issues and problems of team formation and performance, and in particular, the ethical dimensions of creating high-performance teams.

Instructions

1. Download and review the Chapter 8.ppt presentation.
2. Read Chapter 8 in Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership and Chapter 10 in Essentials of Business Ethics. As you read, think about some team you were a part of and how did the team influence you and your actions.
3. View the video “TWZ Role Plays: Organizational Culture.”
4. Navigate to the threaded discussion and respond to the following:
   1. Compare and contrast the different leadership styles displayed by each team leader in the video.
   2. How does each leader’s personal leadership style impact the team’s identity and productivity?
   3. What leadership and followership ethics lessons do you take from this case?
5. Your response should be provide a sufficient level of detail and demonstrate clear, insightful critical thinking.
6. Your initial post should be 200 to 300 words in length and include two academic resources that are properly cited.
7. Your initial post is due by the end of the fourth day of the workshop.
8. Read and conduct a critical analysis of postings by two of your classmates by the end of the workshop.
   1. The topic of your discussion response should be your classmate’s posting and should be written as if you were reviewing his or her posting in an academic journal. Your discussion response should therefore answer the following questions as applicable:
      1. Were the arguments of your classmate articulate and logical? Were the facts correct?
      2. Was the interpretation your classmate provided reasonable and consistent with experts in the field? Was your classmate consistent with both the substance and intent of his/her references?
   2. The focus for your critical analysis is not whether or not you agree with your classmate, but how well his/her position was presented.
   3. Each response should be at least 200 words in length and cite two academic sources. (Note: the academic sources do not count towards the word length requirement.)

Respond to the following:

1. Compare and contrast the different leadership styles displayed by each team leader in the video.
2. How does each leader’s personal leadership style impact the team’s identity and productivity?
3. What leadership and followership ethics lessons do you take from this case?