Week Five Required Post

Conflict

Expedition Log

In answering questions, I think of "my organization" as global house, which is an international dormitory where I am living.

1.     What are the norms about conflict in the culture of your organization? What is the level of openness? Do team members share their opinions openly and dealt with problems directly, or do they raise conflict in oblique, indirect, or passive-aggressive ways?

Global house has the norms about conflict; a dormitory meeting. The meeting is held once in a month and everyone living in global house is forced to attend it. We often discuss issues about our dormitory, especially the issue about budget. I think that this meeting promotes dormitory members to share their opinions openly because of two reasons below.

First, whoever has an opinion can show it with raising his/her hand. There is good atmosphere that any opinions get warmly welcomed.

Second, the meeting uses both English and Japanese. This is important for both Japanese students and International students to understand the dormitory issues and share their opinions.

2.     How many Mooses are there in your organization? Are there taboo topics that affect performance but never discussed? Consider a Moose roundup, or some other proactive way of initiating a discussion about these off-limit topics?

The Moose in our dormitory is OB/OG visitors who used to live in our dormitory and already graduated from it. We have a rule about visitors: visitor hour finishes at 11 p.m. that means no visitors after 11 p.m. However, the border of the rule is ambiguous for OB/OG visitors and no one criticize them when they violate the rule. Everyone finds that this is a problem but no one touches it. 

Therefore, in order to initiate a discussion about this, we first should consider the visitor rules for OB/OGs and make a clear decision to allow them to be in our dormitory after visitor hours or not.