We began our first class on a general note of understanding of the psychological contract to comprehend in a better way the employment relationship.  As the session went on, from the class discussion it became quite evident that all kinds of relationships entail a psychological contract and it is managing the implicit understanding between the employees which needs to be managed properly in order for the relationship to succeed. It brought to light many implicit facts which used to happen in my previous workplace but we never gave enough thought towards its implications. For example, the expectation of raise in salary every year and the loss of trust towards the company when the expected benefits were not given to the employees.

In our second session, we were asked to view the movie “A Man for all Seasons”. I had not seen this movie previously and it was a welcome break for many of us, busy with our daily chores at AIM. This movie was shown to us to have an understanding of the motivation levels that is present in each and every individual and what factors instigates motivation in an individual. This session was actually helpful in understanding the factors which might lead to different motivation levels within our learning team. As in our group I was the only Indian, it was fascinating to understand the motivation behind each of my learning team mates who were Filipinos and were totally different from me culturally.

In these six sessions we went into more detail on the motivation theory applicable to people and also discussed about the mental model theory in dealing with the motivation levels in different people and used the ladder of inference to help us learn the nuances in the motivation development in different people. We discussed about the different pre-determined mental models that people have in their minds about different situations as people see only what they want to see and all their conclusions are derived from what is already a biased observational data. As an example of this would be the mental model of Filipinos that we were lectured upon our arrival in Manila, that normally Filipinos would never say NO to any request even if they actually wanted to say no. As an Indian, my mental model was totally based on the picture that was painted before me during the start of the MBA course. We went through a few examples of how people tend to generalize based on mental models, with the case of the two Imams who were not allowed to fly by the pilot, being the most prominent one.

To make people change their beliefs and mental models, what is required is climbing towards in the ladder of inference. By presenting facts, by presenting alternate routes at achieving similar results people can be motivated to climb down the ladder of inference and hence create a new mental model based on relevant facts. In our Learning team, we tried to implement our learning into trying to understand each other’s mental model and using the knowledge to motivate each other towards a better understanding.

We went even deeper into our analysis of the human behavior with their related mental models using the SIFT model which we used to analyze the characters in the movie “12 Angry Men”. We got some valuable insight into our understanding of the behavior of the human mind and how we can use simulate the different cognitive processes to help people walk down the ladder of inference. With our discussion on group dynamics, we debated on the issues that help in uniting a team using examples and related that same to the group dynamics in our learning teams.

Prof. Arup Maity was our faculty for these two sessions where he taught us the basic concepts on project management and also simulated for us a simple example of the project management concepts required for building a house. What we learnt was also the fact that in managing a project we need to stick to the basics of the plan and not deviate from it as that would result in failure in meeting the project objectives and original requirements. He also gave us an insight of what the expectations would be from us as managers in the future and how to handle group activities in a more meaningful way.

We welcomed the New Year by working on the most important aspects in corporate life, i.e. the team work and team dynamics which lead to a successful output. Dysfunctions in teams are a common happening due to the different individualities present in a team and it is in managing the different people and their work behaviors, lies the true essence of management and leadership.  We learned the necessity of creating and following norms in teams and how emotionally intelligent leaders can build a relationship as they journey together as a group and how then it transforms a group into a team. 

In our discussion today, we were focused on the qualities that a leader should have in order to lead effectively.  According to the authors of the text given for reading, the four main qualities that a leader should have were to show his weakness to his followers, learn to identify critical junctures, ability to empathize with the team and also an ability to show a difference whenever required. As discussed by Professor, the first question a so-called leader has to answer was to point how many followers he has, a question who many people are not able to answer because to be a leader, one must have followers. We ended our discussion b pointing out some caveats in the reading where the authors were contradicting themselves on many of their conceived notions.

We started off our discussion by conceptualizing points on human behavior that make them defy facts while clinging on to their beliefs. People generally are very hard to convince based on facts alone which contradict their beliefs that they had held on to religiously before the new facts came into light. The example was cited regarding the seekers who had predicted that the world would come to an end. But finally when it did not happen as was predicted, instead of treating it as a fallacy, they attributed the new schedule of things as an act of God but still remained attached to their beliefs even though there was an overwhelming array of facts against it. We ended our discussion with the idea that to convince people, we need to first try to see how well we can attach the new ideas to their beliefs and try to motivate them to change their beliefs, rather than attack them with facts in which case we are bound to fail.

Today, was the last day of MPO term 1(We came to know about it after Professor told us that we are not having any classes on Monday as he will be busy with the AACSB people). We discussed today about the cognitive biases that people have where it comes difficult to convince people of the different views prevalent now and which are different from what they have already framed in their minds. Today’s session was a summary of the previous session where we had discussed about the ladder of inference and how people’s thought processes can be manipulated, an example of the same was given about how high priced commodities are sold by pricing some even higher than them , so that people go for them instead. And finally, with the discussion around the level of motivation in people and how they shape their minds according to their cognitive biases, we ended term one MPO course.

The best usage of our sessions was in developing my learning team using the frameworks provided by our Professor and in implementing the concepts for better understanding of my teammates and helping out each other towards a more productive step in our team activities, which form the core of our working culture at AIM.