In the article, 40 years of storming: a historical review of Tuckman’s model of small group development by Denise A. Bonebright we are introduced to Tuckman’s model of small group development and the five hypothesized stages that a group must endure in order to reach the stage of a well functioning group. The four stages are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. I found this article so interesting because I have experienced most of these stages of group development in my past experiences working in a group and did not realize these common occurrences are part of a developed model. The two most common stages I have faced in the real world are forming and norming. Forming is described as the process when the group becomes oriented to tasks, creates ground rules, and tests the boundaries for interpersonal and task behaviors. Nomring is described as the stage where the group forms cohesion. I have always found forming to be the most awkward stage for me. Meeting a new group of people you typically do not know and then trying to quickly figure out how each group member acts and participates in the group is always a challenge. Especially when you have to keep up with deadlines for a project while testing the waters with your group. Norming is by far my favorite part of the process during this process you and your group members fall into a grove and begin to click and perform at the highest level possible. This process makes group work all worth it because you get to see the final product of a group working well together. 

In How to Link Team Values with Personal Values by Jaffe, Dennis, and Scott, Cynthia we learn how some of the top companies in the world can leverage their employees’ values into their own corporation’s value and provide an essence-based organization. In today’s work world many times a company has its own set of values it operates under and does not take into account that their employees may have different values than the company. What happens tho if a company does take into account their employee’s differences in values and creates company values that align with their employees? This article tells us that three major things take place when values align. These consist of motivate commitment, align action, and transcend individual conflicts. Motivate commitment – values can help employees find meaning and purpose in their work, care about what their company is doing, and link their individual efforts to those of the entire company. Align action – With employees having to make many complex decisions, values offer a set of guiding principles. Transcend individual conflicts – Values provide a language and way of understanding individual differences. They also help open the door for nonjudgmental acceptance of different ways of doing things. This simple step of aligning company values with employee values creates a more motivated workforce because they are now working not toward the company’s values but their own. This is a practice all companies should look into and try for an easy way to make the workplace more enjoyable and productive overall. 

The other reading that stood out to me was the article “Why Ethical People Make Unethical Choices”. I am a finance major here at State and after college, I want to go into higher finance which consists of large banks and financial firms. Although this industry is very profitable it typically is tainted with unethical behavior and decisions. Despite good intentions, organizations set themselves up for ethical catastrophes by creating environments in which people feel forced to make choices they could never have imagined. Former Federal Prosecutor Serina Vash says, “When I first began prosecuting corruption, I expected to walk into rooms and find the vilest people. I was shocked to find ordinarily good people I could well have had coffee with that morning. And they were still good people who’d made terrible choices(pg2 line 9-19).” This passage from the text perfectly describes why there is unethical behavior, especially in banks and financial institutions. These companies have their employees buy into the belief that the most important thing is profit and nothing else. By having employees believe that their only goal should be to boost profits and make as much money as possible with no regard to anything else you will find unethical behavior. This is why you see companies such as Wells Fargo open thousands of fake accounts without people knowing, and companies making their employees work 100-plus hours a week. When a company instills the wrong values in its employees consequences will shortly follow as it has for many large banks and financial firms in the past. 

For module 1 of SLC 300, we were assigned to read three different articles. These articles were focused on what characteristics make good leaders, how to identify your own values and implement them into your style of leadership, and why leaders may make unethical decisions sometimes. While reading Forbes’s top 10 list of characteristics in leadership they touched base on what I believe is the most important and that is communication. Forbes describes communication as an essential part of being on a team and more importantly, leading a team. If you can not clearly communicate then your team will be on different pages and not working towards the same goal. I saw the importance of communication firsthand this summer during my internship at Fidelity. I strongly believe that part of my success this past summer was due to the communication between me and my manager. We met the first week of work to go over how I like to work, the best way to critique my work, and how we should go about communicating with each other throughout the internship. This was critical to my success in so many ways. This provided me and my manager with clear expectations going forward from the first week and allowed us to openly communicate with each other whether that be in regards to a project I was working on or her helping when I got stuck. In today’s world, I believe communication is overlooked by many people because they believe it is so simple and unimportant to success when in reality it is a pillar to any successful relationship in the workspace and especially as a leader. 

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