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How leadership can affect groupperformance
Bob van den Bergh
Technical University Eindhoven
r.j.a.v.d.bergh@student.tue.nl
10-8-2007
European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management
www.estiem.org
ESTIEM Document Template
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents 2
Introduction 3
Observation at the workshop 4
What tasks were given 4
What tasks did we do 4
Splitting up the groups 4
How informal leadership can affect group performance 4
Motivating different kind of group-members 4
Importance of informal opinion building 4
Role of informal leadership 4
The issue of agendas 4
Conclusion 4
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Introduction
I am going to tell something about how an informal leader can affect a group in order to
perform. The development that I write about is derived from the two week experience of
being together with a group of people with really high potential. I want to point out that this is
not really about saying others how to act, but rather what I saw during these two weeks. I
want to get some grip on the used concepts so that I am able to use this myself. This is thus
useful for my personal development. I do not say that there are not any useful parts in it for
somebody else but I am not writing it for that reason.
I will first tell something about the workshop we did. I do this because I experienced the most
of the concepts I am describing over there. Next I will write my personal development part in
which I am trying to get some grip on the complex reality.
But that’s life! ;)
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Observation at the workshop
What tasks were given
In this summer academy we had a workshop at an industrial company. It is a factory in which
they produce all kinds of parts. The assignment we got was to make some new manuals for
workers because they should more easily understand what they were doing. But, as critical as
we are, we started asking ourselves the question: what are we doing and which problem are
we supposed to solve. Because we already had some experience with problem solving, we
started analysing the problem and came up with the fact that it was actually a quality problem
we were supposed to solve.
What tasks did we do
After analysing the problem we came up with a motivation problem rather than a problem for
the employees to understand the current manuals. But, there was a problem here, because we
were not supposed to solve a quality problem but just to improve the current manual. After
discussions with the group we came up with the idea to split up the groups and to have several
people working on the new manual and having the others to start thinking about the general
quality problem. I do not want to get into details about what we did but I go into the process
of how we got to do these things and how the leader had a role in getting us to do this in this
way without affecting the team-spirit.
Splitting up the groups
The workshop took three days; on the first day we decided what to do and the second and
third day were used to actually do it. But first I want to tell some more about the first day and
how we came up with splitting up into groups.
There was a majority of people who thought of making the new manuals being boring and
solving the general quality problem as being interested. So, although it seemed that everybody
would rather want to work on the general problem we split up the group as mentioned before
because we still had the responsibility of doing our assignment. Rather than having a large
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discussion (or poll and vote) the way in which the group split up was rather undemocratic in
my opinion (it is probably good we did it this way but that is another point). The way it was
done was, that there was one person starting on the general problem and the rest of the group
being convinced about our responsibility of making a new manual started to work
How informal leadership can affect group performance
The important thing I learned these two weeks was the impact of the leader on groupthinking.
There are two different kinds of leaders in a group; the person with the formality of
being the leader, and the leader who affects the group-thinking to get him to push his own
idea through. So, in one way or another we are all informal leaders. The only point in it is that
some people are more effective in doing it than others.
Motivating different kind of group-members
This point was actually brought up by one of the students and the funny thing was that after
hearing this, I started to realise that I actually experienced it myself. I noticed in the
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