Mt. Everest Simulation
Mt. Everest Simulation
Mt. Everest Simulation
Table of Contents
1.0
2.0
2.1
2.2
Psychological Safety.......................................................................................................................5
2.3
Group Thinking..............................................................................................................................7
3.0
Conclusions....................................................................................................................................8
4.0
Reference.......................................................................................................................................9
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hiking speed to their teammates, probably due to ignorance or purposely to boost individual
chances of achieving personal goals.
My role as an observer is to examine the team interaction as they ascended Mt. Everest
establishing team dynamics, paying particular attention to information sharing, leadership,
conflict and decision-making. Therefore, this essay aims to discuss and critically examine our
team's effectiveness as regards to the role of our leader, psychological safety, and group
thinking.
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deals. His sense of responsibility, a never give up mentality, high levels of commitment , and
willingness to make personal sacrifice for the team over personal goals took control of him. He
made an attempt to reach the summit with the team leader but ended up being rescued and
earned the lowest points below the team average. Sometimes democratic leadership style can
potentially enhance team effectiveness under certain circumstances, while an autocratic style
may facilitate effectiveness under a different set of circumstances. I was expecting the team
leader to exercise her leadership authority at this point to stop the marathoner from climbing
further, but that was not the case in this instance.
When a leader knows where he/she wants to go, makes the priority clear to the team, shares
necessary information and lets them know what the values are, this can be an important step in
getting there. The role of the expedition leader is to coordinate and develop the people, motivate
them when their morale is down, resolve conflict, inspire them to great height and expand
communication channels with the team. Our team leader has the experience and necessary skill
sets but lacks effective leadership abilities in some instances, but demonstrates leadership
capabilities at other times. For example, the physician was left in camp 1 while all the team
members were in camp 2, and the leader reached the top of Mt. Everest alone. Although the
entire team saw nothing wrong in these, they didnt discuss the implications of leaving the
physician behind, nor did they challenge the team leader. Should a member of the team have
fallen ill, who was going to administer medicine? This raises the question of: What is the
implication of psychological safety on the team's effectiveness? See section 2.2.
A leader is responsible for the team safety, and sometimes it is necessary to make a self-sacrifice
to show commitment to the team and to demonstrate that he/she considered the team's welfare to
be more important than a personal goal. It is not uncommon for some companys CEO to make a
personal sacrifice when a company faces an economic downturn to demonstrate their sense of
commitment. For example, The Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata took a self-imposed 50% salary cut
for five months due to Nintendos current economic slump before he asked his employees to
accept pay cuts and reduced working hours. Our team leader exhibited lack of commitment and
collective interest, and displayed incompetence by not dealing swiftly with the uncertainty posed
by the climbing of Mt. Everest. In my view, I did not feel that our team performed effectively
well together, the team effectiveness average response of 3.70 reflected this compared to other
teams, although it was higher than average.
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recall when the team members disagreed with each other or with the leader in any of the
instances in which they had to make a difficult decision, there was always consensus and a
complete voice of consent. Presumably, I could attribute this to low psychological safety, while
at the same time it was difficult to tell from my vantage point. You cannot easily read body
language, personal conversation, and individual interactions by clinging to your phone handset
since the whole team discussion was through conference phone.
The fact is that, our team members had no time to develop a trust relationship with each other,
we were not familiar with each other in the class. Though there was mutual respect among the
team members, I could not absolutely reach a conclusion assumed by Roberto (2003) that the
benefits of speaking up by team members are likely to be given more weight. If there is respect
and trust, there will be a willingness to discuss incompetency, mistakes or errors made by a team
member since it will not be held against the perpetrator. Under a team setting, I could logically
reach this conclusion but it is quite difficult to logically say this was true from my position
during the group Mt. Everest simulation.
the success of a team based on the team members' tendency to easily reach consensus without
critically analysing and deliberating on the alternative courses of action. According to Manz &
Neck (1995) there are two main ingredients for groupthink; cohesiveness and conformity. From
my discussion so far, without an iota of doubt in my mind, our Mt. Everest simulation team
exhibited high team cohesion, and a tendency to echo agreement and acceptance of the group
decisions without query. Although, the same team applied a consensus decision-making process,
very often the opinions of the dominant figure during team deliberation were unanimously
accepted by the team.
The team exhibited a strong bond, team camaraderie, friendly atmosphere, and a sense of
relationship affiliated to Groupthink. This environment negatively impacted the group decisionmaking process and hence led to dysfunctional decisions, though not obviously to team
members. In the sense that, the team members hardly disagreed or showed signs of being
offended, conflict and dissent seemed taboo, implicitly avoided by all the team members. This
led to a breakdown in critical thinking and analysis among team members. Edmondson (1999)
tells us that group cohesiveness can reduce willingness to disagree and challenge each other's
views. Arguably, without groupthink it will be difficult for a team to reach a consensus on
extreme conflict or difficult situations synonymous to climbing of Mt. Everest, as no time is
permitted for team deliberation in such a situation. Though, I am not foolish to assume that the
team unity is based on friendship as it surfaces but on a members pursuit to climb to the top of
Mt. Everest simulation, and achieve individual and team goals.
Groupthink inhibits positive dissent. Constructive criticism is healthy in a team climate, it is an
improvement mechanism if the rationale is without personal gain or ulterior motive. Conflict
seems a negative word without positive elements, conversely, it can be used as an innovative
mechanism to generate ideas and foster creativity among team members. The environment the
decision take place in influences individual contributions positively or negatively. For example,
our Mt. Everest expeditions team leader encouraged participation, inclusion and empowered the
team members to contribute to the decision-making process. When a team leader adopts
autocratic leadership style, it is possible the team develops a symptom of groupthink known as
self-censoring. A situation whereby a team member censors their own thoughts and opinion to
unanimously accept a team decision despite the fact that they disagree with the decision. Lack of
self-esteem, fear of being reprimanded, insufficient knowledge, scorn or shared laziness can
prevent a team member from contributing his own thoughts or confiding in other team members.
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3.0 Conclusion
The team leader's role is to give the team a direction, inspire, motivate, and guide the team
members toward achieving personal and team goals. The leader has a critical role to play when a
team ascends to the top of Mt. Everest, leadership decision-making ability might be the
difference between success and tragedy. The leader is tasked to get the team from where they are
now to where they have never been. On Mt. Everest, disaster can strike without any warning,
and render the most capable person dead within a blink of an eye, so the leaders ability to
master the art of improvisation is a sine qua non for climbing Mt. Everest successfully.
Logically, not all skilful and experienced high-altitude mountaineers could be considered a good
leader. Leadership is the art of influencing others to achieve a goal. A leader nurtures, coaches,
and commits to the team cause.
Psychological safety describes a team environment characterised by interpersonal trust and
mutual respect in which the group members are comfortable of being themselves (Edmondson
1999). Individual team members' sense of belonging plays a significant role in the way they feel
and perceive the cross-function Mt. Everest simulation team. In a team climate where people feel
free and are encouraged to speak up without fear of being reprimanded or scorned by the leader
or the team members, innovative ideas to progress tend to grow. Most of the highly effective
team demonstrate shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, in such a team
self-censoring disappear giving room for a highly confident team climate.
The concept of groupthink is based on the idea of a cohesive group that becomes so concerned
about group unity that they fail to critically and realistically assess their decisions and
assumption that bring about those decisions. Undoubtedly, our Mt. Everest expeditions team
suffered from groupthink, due to lack of familiarity and insufficient knowledge of the Mt.
Everest simulation that led to implicit fear among individual team members to speak up.
However, the team deployed group consensus decision-making which is particularly useful when
all team members have vast knowledge of the subject. When knowledge is lacking, a team
member that has extensive knowledge dominates the team proceedings, and can make
unchallenged unanimity decisions.
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4.0Reference
Edmondson, A. (1999) Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work
teams. Administrative science quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
Edmondson, A., Bohmer, R., & Pisano, G. (2001) Speeding up team learning. Harvard business
review, 79(9), 125-134.
Hart, P. (1991) Irving L. Janis' Victims of Groupthink. Political Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 2:
viewed at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791464; on 23rd of October, 2014.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/mortality-on-mount-everest/360927/
viewed on 23rd of October, 2014.
Kim, W. C., & Mauborgne, R. (2003). Fair process: Managing in the knowledge
economy. Harvard Business Review, 81(1), 127-136.
Manz, C. C., & Neck, C. P. (1995). Teamthink: beyond the groupthink syndrome in selfmanaging work teams. Journal of Managerial Psychology,10(1), 7-15.
Roberto, M. A. (2003). Lessons from Everest: The Interaction of Cognitive Bias, Psychological
Safety, and System Complexity. California Management Review Vol 45. No.1
Stasser, G., Vaughan, S. I., & Stewart, D. D. (2000). Pooling unshared information: The benefits
of knowing how access to information is distributed among group members. Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 82(1), 102-116.
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