The Student's Guide to Successful Project Teams

It is common for undergraduate and graduate students across various disciplines to be placed on teams and assigned group project research reports and presentations which require them to work together. For example a psychology course requires teams to develop, conduct, analyze and present the result of their experiments, a marketing course requires student project teams to prepare marketing plans and present their conclusions, and an organizational behavior course forms teams for the purpose of researching the cultures of different organizations and making presentations about their findings. This new guidebook will be a core text on how to help student project teams confront and successfully resolve issues, tasks and problems. Sections include conceptual material, stories and illustrations, and exercises. Students and teachers in Organizational Behavior, Management, Marketing and all psychology disciplines will find this book of interest.

Table of Contents:
1. Dimensions of the Student Project Team. 2. The Learning Team. 3. Team Formation. 4. Team Roles and Responsibilities. 5. Influence and Decision Making. 6. Process Improvements. 7. Useful Conflicts. 8. Full Engagement. 9. Final Examinations. Appendix. Project Team Development Exercises

About the Author :
William A. Kahn is Professor of Organizational Behavior at Boston University’s School of Management, where he has taught since earning his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1987. Bill teaches courses on effective group dynamics, team learning, negotiations, and managing organizational change. His research focuses on relationships at work, which includes hierarchical, peer, group, and inter-group relations. Professor Kahn has published articles in a wide variety of academic journals, authored several books, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Management Education. For the last decade Bill has coordinated the Team Learning component of the School of Management’s Executive MBA Program. He has received the Broderick Prize for Teaching and, twice, the General Electric Team Learning Award from Boston University’s School of Management.

Review :
"Bill Kahn has produced a wonderful book that I've waited a long time for. Helping students work better in teams is a challenge I face every time I teach. Kahn has produced just the book to give students insights they need to understand and negotiate the predictable vicissitudes of team life. The result should be teams that frustrate less, learn more, and get more done." -Lee Bolman, The University of Missouri-Kansas City, Bloch School of Business and Public Administration "What's great about this book is that it centers the lessons on student teams. As a consequence, I think the material will be more meaningful to students. This will be useful in many types of courses that use teams, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Accordingly, it could serve as a required text in a groups and teams course such as the one I teach to the MBA students, or as a supplement in a course with a heavy team component (a course where there is a major group project or many small group projects)."- Jeff LePine, University of Florida, Warrington College of Business Administration "I think this book would be an excellent supplement to a standard Organizational Behavior textbook and would serve to open the class up to a rich learning experience. The biggest feature of the book is that it encourages appropriate, useful conversations within teams. I think that its emphasis on interaction and attention to process give it great applied value. The book's use of examples helps put the theory into action and helps create the bridge between data and practice in real groups" -Bryan Bonner, University of Utah, David Eccles School of Business