Meso-Leadership (Business Groups)

Meso-leadership creates and empowers groups, including teams, units, and organizations.

General views of Meso-Leadership

Meso-Leadership creates and empowers groups, including teams, units, and organizations.

“Meso-level analysis, detailed examination of a specific group, community, or organization, studies certain parts of a society.”¹.

The above definition from www.coursehero.com aligns well with Ultimate Enterprise.

Meso Business Leadership deals with business groups and team effectiveness establishment. Team/group building involves analyzing the behaviors of groups, which are usually different from individuals; it deals with mutual interactions and communications, team building, team dynamics, team leadership, team effectiveness, negotiations, work design, and conflict management. When you look at the main task of Meso High-Performing Business along with the Personality Tetra Receptor (PTR), it falls into two main groups: system logistics and group and team relationships (cognitive, spiritual, emotional, and moral intelligences).

Meso-Leadership in System Logistics (Job Analysis and Job Design)

System logistics, we mean job analysis and job design for the optimum execution of goals with the highest efficiency possible. “To achieve efficiency, companies minimize the resources consumed by providing a product or service. Thus, the efficiency perspective on work design is concerned with creating jobs that conserve time, human energy, raw materials, and other productive resources” ²(p. 125). This implies that job design is purely analytical, followed by synthesizing, as discussed in Personality Tetra Receptor (PTR) above.

Meso-Leadership in Group and Team Relationships

Team building is difficult if done without consideration of core relationship attributes qualifying smooth connections. This relationship extends negotiation skills discussed earlier. In organization teams and groups, relationships define interdependences in the cause of performing works competitively; the Personal Influence Zones (PI-Zones) control and monitor their success.

Meso-Leadership in Group/Team Semantic Clearance

A group is the collection of two or more individuals joined by possessing similar needs, collective norms, and goals with a common identity that interacts in order to achieve particular objectives. Two types of groups exist, viz. Formal and informal; a formal group is that defined and created by an organization structure and aligned with organizational goals. Informal group manifest between individuals as social interaction ³

Group

A group is a more comprehensive term than a team. A group varies in scope from two individuals to several thousands; however, a team also varies but in a limited number. Classmates in a certain college form a group and a family of a married couple. Community parties, governments, and non-governmental organizations are groups but not teams; however, within themselves, they comprise teams. A team comprises less than 20 (twenty) individuals who interact with one another directly to achieve a common goal, with an emphasis that everyone in that team is mutually accountable for one’s performance. 

Team

Team: “A team is a few people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goal, and approach for which they are mutually accountable.”⁴.

Self-Managing Teams are special teams emerging from successful high-performance business expertise that exploits quality as a basis for business development from self-managing teams known as QC teams in TQM and PM teams in TPM.

Committee

Committees are groups of persons appointed to perform a function on behalf of a larger group. The larger body entrusts a smaller subset of members to do something for them. Some committees are enduring, as they have no axed endpoint. Others may be ad hoc committees, appointed with a well-defined charge and deadline, after which the committee will cease to exist.

Task Force

Task Force: Task forces are work groups typically comprising experts in specified areas of knowledge or practice and resources… brought together to accomplish a specific aim, expecting the group will disband when the aim achieved ⁵.

Group/Team Interdependence

Jobs are changing frequently in their trend, i.e., from routine to non-routine, because the customer’s desires also change at a big pace. The rise of technology is also complicating job contents but simplifying its execution; using information technology is forcing jobs to change their pace by completing execution on time. Information system shift is at the rate of “every twelve to eighteen months; computers double their capabilities, and so do the information technologies that use them.”⁶ 

However, in an organization’s view, to guarantee total quality, a team demands more responses to the changing customer’s demands and environmental shifting, thus constraining them to work in a unified process called collaboration among teams. Sometimes, it implements teams without transforming the organizational scope or providing adequate resources or training. Organizations sometimes deceive themselves by calling groups of employees as teams without really altering work or the organizational motivation system. These are self-deceptive moves, which are major causes of failure in most organizations.

Group Ethics and Standards

In individual decision-making, I base preferences on one’s interests, unlike in a group where consensus applies. When a group begins, group members might spread among all comfort zones, as regard to Personal Influence Zones (PI-Zones). Depending on the size of the group, they might concentrate some individuals on some zones more than others. Successful groups will comprise more members from PUER than from CUER, where self-deception is dominant.

Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living in Groups

In search of sound decision-making in groups and teams, several theories exist summarized and differentiated similar terms surrounding Kidder, R. ⁷

Kidder, R., suggests that decision-making is driven by PUER in relation to Si, Ci, Ei, and Mi and that some decisions fall into one of two categories: moral temptations and ethical dilemmas.

This concludes Meso High-Performing Business, which plays a secondary role in an organization’s success because, whatever bright the primary role (Micro High-Performing), an organization fails. We need credible individuals, effective groups & best teams, and the best organization culture (discussed next) to succeed in an organization setup.

1. https://www.coursehero.com/sg/introduction-to-sociology/macro-level-meso-level-and-micro-level-analysis/ accessed on 3-9-2021 ↩︎
2. John A. Wagner III and John R. Hollenbeck: Organization Behaviour: Securing Competitive Advantage; ©2010 Taylor & Francis ↩︎
3. Stephen P. Robbins: Organization Behaviour, 11e, ©2005 Prentice Hall Inc. ↩︎
4. Katzenbach J.R. & Smith D.K., The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization, ©1993 Boston: Harvard Business School Press ↩︎
5. Courtesy: R. KEVIN GRIGSBY, DSW from https://www.aamc.org/download/164730/data/grigsby_committee_task_force_team.pdf access 11-11-13 ↩︎
6. The Emerging Future: Estimating the speed of exponential Technological Advancement: ©2012 The Emerging Future, LLC ↩︎
7. Rushworth Kidder: How good people make tough choices: Resolving the dilemmas of ethical living (1st Fireside ed.)—©1996—New York: Simon & Schuster. ↩︎