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How Does Improper Use of Power Limit Group Performance?

Most people who have been in the working world for sometime have come across a situation where a single person uses power and authority with a dominating communication style to push their will on a corporate board, team, or workplace. Research by Tost, et. al (2013) discusses some of the pitfalls of doing so and the eventual decline of team performance. As performance declines so does the ability of organizations to generate income through collaborative effort and idea generation.  Politicized workplaces are stressful and generally unproductive. According to Eisenhardt and Bourgeois (1988), when there is power inequality within the workplace political conflict rises and team performance declines. Teams should be well balanced to ensure that there is equity of power and the ability to discuss concepts openly for better idea generation.  Power should be used to help push good ideas through to create greater productivity. However, when power is used to diminish the brainstormi

Communication Creates Higher Cognitive Models for Team Building

Workplace communication and cross-culture interaction can help foster greater levels of collaborative effort. A paper by Huber & Lews (2011) highlights how heuristics and bias are a platform for first understanding others but additional information creates stronger cognitive models. It is these models within groups or across groups that adjust overtime to create mutual development.  When individuals understand each other’s cognitive models they create cross-understanding (Huber & Lewis, 2010). Cross-understanding can also occur on a group level whereby a cognitive model for a group and their vantage point has been developed. Knowing how your communication partners think and understand can be beneficial for relating information in a way in which it is palatable and creating shared understandings. Shared understandings range from low to high in terms of their accuracy and quantity of information. Some may know very little about other groups while some may have a gre