Class Exercise

Class Exercise

On Thursday October 23rd, our Organizational Behavior (OB) class participated in an exercise involving power and leadership. Our objective was to find fifteen elements of leadership [but not necessarily power] and list them down on a piece of paper. The class was divided in three groups; Red Group's fifteen traits were be based on just themselves - the head of the organization; Blue Group's fifteen traits were be based on the individual; White Group's fifteen traits were based on the entire organization. Each group had fifteen pieces of paper [a.k.a. chips] with their respective color and had the option to collaborate with the other groups in exchange of chips. At the end of the session, our professor read each group's list out loud and if they wanted, any group member could argue about the context of the word in relation to our respective task and even veto it off the list. Whichever group had all fifteen words won the class challenge. Unfortunately, no groups were able to pull of this feat. Each group continuously argued with each other about one word or another, and the professor dismissed all the debated words; hence, no groups had all fifteen words. I was in the Red Group and I failed to see why the other groups had to argue with our list. My group was supposedly the "top gun" of this operation and to my knowledge, the remaining two groups were inferior to us. They shouldn't have had the opportunity to challenge us any way simply because of the fact that we had power over them! We could veto any words [with a good argument] from any other groups, but when it came to our group, the other groups could challenge us and not have to veto our words because we had the higher position. In addition, I noticed that when it was our turn to list the fifteen words, timing conflicts affected the way our professor handled the vetoing portion of the exercise; he dismissed any debated words without even hearing our side of the argument! I understood that it was time to end...

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