Overcome the Barrier of Cross-Functional Teams

According to Holland's typology of personality in the course materials, there are six types shown as above. If the personality and congruent occupation do not fit well, satisfaction is lower and turnover is high. The software team leader A was a social guy keen on social activities and helping others. But his role as a lead software engineer required him to act in an investigative way. Meanwhile he was an extravert prone to enjoy aggressive and team-oriented cultures rather than agreeable and supportive organization. He complained about the hardware design team's compromise to accept using the low cost potentiometer model recommended by marketing team. This directly added workload for software and manufacturing teams.

It was the organizational constraints that affected the rational decision making of this new product development. Since the marketing manager would like company to be the first mover in wireless sensor market, he implicitly put a lot pressure on schedule and cost. Therefore hardware team didn't evaluate the manufacturing efficiency and feasibility at the very beginning and complied with marketing team's decision of using the part of lower cost and shorter lead time. It was difficult for hardware team to gather all the technical data before they finalized the layout design and bill of materials. But after the project entered the pilot run phase, the production capacity met bottleneck and operators needed almost 2 minutes to calibrate. Although the marketing team's plan to reduce cost was rational, they neglected the potential opportunity cost and risks in later period of manufacturing.

Although this project had a lot of problems to be solved, it created the opportunity for global cooperation and helped company accumulate experience and organizational process assets. I think using of proper leadership style, more rational decision-making, creating motivation and establishing effective teams will lead to success and make company more profitable.

First, the manager or team leader should have a clear picture of subordinates' personality traits. Before allocating workload and tasks to certain employee, manager could first use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality-assessment instrument to balance whether he/she is going to fit the job and organization well. In this case, the key position of lead software engineer values most in analytical, logic and investigative personalities. Therefore manger can assign other candidate to take the responsibility of software development and give A the opportunity to be a project leader who needs to be more aggressive and team-oriented.

Second, manager should set and implement clear, realistic and measurable goals and make fair judgment on employee's equity to increase their loyalty to the organization. To help global project team work more efficiently, manager could set specific goals for group rather