The Organisational Zoo

The Organisational Zoo activity involves students participating in an online behavioural style survey. The survey is designed to deepen their understanding of how behaviours displayed at work and in a social settings impact on other types of behaviours. Students will learn to interact and modify their own behaviour according to the behavioural styles of others to build positive working relationships.

Rationale

This learning activity provides enhanced understanding of students’ preferred behavioural styles and how to work more effectively with other behavioural styles to achieve a positive outcome.

Learners/Context

Suitable for use in both large and small groups, particularly before students are required to work together in a group.

Alignment

The Organisational Zoo activity provides an opportunity to improve emotional intelligence.

Instructions/Processes

Setting the scene:

Familiarise yourself with The Organisational Zoo behavioural profile tool and the animal characters (see link in Resources/Technology).
Develop a set of questions to help students analyse and reflect on their profile results (assigned animal character/s) and how it matches/mismatches with other Organisational Zoo characters in work and social settings. Some questions, for example, may include:
- What character did you most closely ‘match’?
  Notes:
  1. Results may indicate a mix animals/styles
  2. You can call out each of the different types of animal characters and ask students to raise their hand when their animal character is called out
  3. Based on hand count you can get a good idea whether there is a dominant animal character in the group
  4. If there is a dominant animal you can ask students why they think this might be the case.
- Do you think the profile results provide an accurate picture of your dominant behavioural style? Why / why not?
- Do you think the character matches and mismatches are correct? Why / why not?
- What strategies do you think you could use to work more effectively with those characters that have a very different behavioural style to your own?
- In regard to building a project team, what type of animals do you think you need to build an effective team?
- Do you need a balance of animals in a team or is there one (or more) animal that you need more or less of in the team?
- One of the objectives of the profile is to help people learn and apply ideas towards working better together. Do you think this profile provides insights that can help you do that?
Explain the concept for the Organisational Zoo profile in class - see http://www.organizationalzoo.com/about/.
Advise that students that they must complete the profile prior to attending the next class (see Resources/Technology) and explain that they need to complete the profile in the context of how they behave in class.
Post instructions and link on Blackboard course announcements.

Follow up class:

Ask pre-prepared questions to analyse results and build student understanding about different behavioural styles when working with others.
Explain the connection between the Organisational Zoo and student learning, particularly how it impacts on the effectiveness of course group work and graduate employability skills.

Conditions/Critical Success Factors

Access to the Organizational Zoo behavioural survey tool.
Access to BlackBoard.
Completion of the behavioural profile prior to attending class.

Resources/ Technology

Organisational Zoo

Download Pattern:

Marketing_TOZ.pdf

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Design Pattern

The Organisational Zoo