Rocket Model For Team Effectiveness:

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Rocket Model for Team Effectiveness: Three hundred miles south of New Zealand are the Auckland Islands. They are isolated, forbidding, and 150 years ago, they brought almost certain death to ships that got too close. The howling sub-Antarctic winds drove ships onto the shallow reefs, and most sailors quickly drowned. Those who made it to shore soon died of exposure and starvation. Those few who survived did so in dreadful conditions. In Island of the Lost, Joan Druett (2007) recounts the story of two parties who were shipwrecked in 1864 on opposite sides of the island, and it is a story of leadership and team work. The first, a party of five led by Captain Thomas Musgrave of England, behaved like Shackleton’s crew stranded in the Weddell Sea. Encouraged by Musgrave, the men banded together in a common quest for survival. Over a period of 20 months, using material salvaged from their ship, they built a cabin, found food, rotated cooking duties, nursed one another, made tools, tanned seal hides for shoes, built a bellows and a furnace, made bolts and nails, and then built a boat which they used to sail to safety. Meanwhile, 20 miles away, a Scottish ship led by Captain George Dalgarno went aground and 19 men made it safely to shore. Delgarno became depressed, went “mad”, and the rest of the crew fell into despair, anarchy, and then cannibalism. A sailor named Robert Holding tried to encourage the others to act together to build shelter and find food, but other members of the crew threatened to kill and eat him. After three months, only three men were alive and subsequently rescued. Although this story takes place almost 150 years ago, it has strong parallels to modern teams. How a group of people works together determines whether a team succeeds of fails, yet personal experience and in-depth research tells us that most teams have problems with morale, innovation,

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