The S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, a reputed campus in Mumbai,
is delving deep into the Ganguly-Chappell issue to arrive at a few important
conclusions about the team environment.
Called the "Indian Cricket Saga" the lesson is for institute"s
MBA students in the organisational behaviour class. It discusses the stormy
and bitter fight between present coach Greg Chappell and former captain Ganguly
which took the nation by storm.
"With any new person joining the team, as it happened with Chappell,
the dynamics of the group change," said Lata Dheer, a teacher at the institute. "We
say there are four stages in team formation: forming, storming, norming and
performing. If a new person comes into a performing team, it can go back to
the storming stage. This could have happened to the Indian team," said
Dheer.
The case study, developed by Dheer, her colleague Suresh Lalwani and students
Pankaj Dontam Setty and Praveen Sareen, found Chappell to be more aggressive
and a "taskmaster." Ganguly was identified as tough, intuitive and
an emotional leader.
"When two strong-willed individuals work together, there was bound to
be more than a little friction." A few who were involved in the case study
felt Chappell came from a culture of high achievers and hence was keen to implement
changes rather quickly. Others felt he was setting too many individual goals
apart from team goals which was confusing the players.
However, a majority believed that Chappell was a "situational leader" trying
to prepare the team for the 2007 World Cup and didn"t have much time.
"May be Chappell wanted to prove himself too quickly and was keen to
pit the Indian team against the formidable Australians," said one of the
participants. The case study was recently published in European Case Clearning
House journal.
"The attempt was to drw parallels from the sports arena to explain team
performance in organisations." Ganguly was the most successful Indian
captain but of late his individual performance was not up to the mark. It was
felt that the leader must perform and set examples for the rest of the team
but Ganguly was a failure in this respect. As the study focused on team performance,
one way out was to stay away from the power bases and create your own "personal
power" irrespective of other people, like Sachin Tendulkar"s, which
gives an employee his own position in the organisation.
The other idea was to give free time to high performers so they don't
burn out.
Real key, insisted Dheer, was to go for "distributed leadership" and
treat it as an important organisational study.
"Different persons should lead in different situations.
"If Ganguly was good for one situation, the baton should have been passed
on to another in a different situation and Ganguly could have been brought back
if the situation demanded so," Dheer said.
