THE SHIPPING INDUSTRY ACCOUNTING TEAM
Summary:
Sarah (the name given by us) has been working in McKay, Sanderson, and Smith Associates a mid-sized accounting team located in Boston that is specialized in commercial accounting and audits for past five years. Her specialty is accounting practices for shipping companies, ranging from small to certain big fleets along east coast.
About two months ago her company merged with another two other accounting firms which has offices in Miami, Seattle, Baton Rouge, and Los Angeles. They avoided centralizing their business around one office in Los Angeles. Instead they formed a new firm called Goldberg, Choo, and McKay Associates in order to leverage the synergies of their collective knowledge.
They are accountants; emails are not enough to discuss the wide range of aspects in accounting.
The second problem is the organizational leadership. There is no leader in the group, therefore the aspect of controlling and delegating tasks in managing the team become ambiguous and difficult. This has lead to arguments and misunderstanding in the clarity of each of the members’ roles.
The Team design has problems regarding the tasks. The Task were not clearly defined especially the strategic plan they had make. They can’t even communicate properly let alone handle complicated and ambiguous task. Another matter is that their task is highly interdependence due to a reciprocal relationship in carrying out their tasks. For example Sarah and each of them, submit to each other their monthly financial report of their respective clients, then they coordinate among themselves and combine they reports into one to submit to their HQ.
In the aspect of the team processes, first weaknesses can be seen in the early development of the team. There was no face-face contact initially; therefore the forming process was not properly done. The next level that is norming becomes even difficult eventually causing problem s among them. No norms are established, and Sarah had problems with Brad with their work times. Sarah start work at 7.30am while Brad at 9.30am, this conflicting norms that they even cause greater problem for the Norming process.
The team cohesiveness from the start is not