Innovation and Idea Generation at Saudi Aramco

This assignment examines personal experiences with idea generation within a team at Saudi Aramco. The report analyzes the role of teamwork and suggests implementing crowdsourcing as a solution-finding method. It draws upon secondary information about innovation trends in Saudi Arabia and South Africa, comparing them to the company's current practices.

Group Work: A Personal Analysis
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................................3
Group Behaviours and contrast positive and negative behaviour ...............................................3
Information Sharing ....................................................................................................................4
Way to generate Idea ..................................................................................................................4
CONCLUSION ...............................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES ...............................................................................................................................6
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INTRODUCTION
In contemporary era, the importance of group behaviour has been realized for attaining
the success of a company. Organisational effectiveness is based in the behaviour of group
members. Here, in this report, I am going to reflect on the behaviour of a group, in which I have
worked in. In this report, I evaluate the dynamics of group, information sharing medium and
interaction process within my workplace.
Group Behaviours and contrast positive and negative behaviour
Being an employee at Saudi Aramco, I have worked in both formal and informal groups
and a different experience. Working in bot the groups, I have found that people behaves
differently in both the situations. In my organization, informal groups are created for the
purpose of adopting just to develop and maintain relations with people. I found that working in a
formal group is tougher than working an informal group as more conflicts can be faced due to
behaviours of individual in a group. The positive behaviour of individuals affects the team
performance in a positive way (Cyr & Wei Choo, 2010).
Group dynamics refers the psychological process and behaviors exist among group of
people. It lays down overall process related to formation of group, its structure and functioning.
In my opinion organization like Saudi Aramco ensure existence of group dynamics because there
I work in a formal team. Under this, our team get task and that particular task is broken into
small parts in accordance with expertise of members. This facilitates to carry out task in right
manner and increase collaboration among members. We support each other in order to get
collective success and appreciation provided by Saudi Armaco.
By working in team I noticed that different issues related to communication, work
allocation and negative behaviour of employees creates issues. These issues affect overall
performance because somewhere it affected our collaborative working to a great extent. Owing
to this, corporation can use informal meeting or gathering once in week. This aid to interact with
group members and we can talk to each other apart from job profile also. This aspect proves to
be effective in knowledge sharing (Kimble, Grenier and Goglio-Primard, 2010). Apart from this,
I found that a team must have support from expert team leader because he/she ensures that where
we are lacking and can put efforts to resolve the issues. Similarly, with the help of team leader all
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members can resolve personal issues by sharing or communicating everything with each other.
Personally, I found group dynamic is the effective process through which an organization can
create its competitive edge. This has direct impact on service or product quality through which
customers' expectation can be met in right manner. Furthermore, I perceive that informal meeting
should be promoted at workplace. This leads to attain organizational objectives on right time.
Also, this help to coordinate among each department and motivate personnel to perform better.
Information Sharing
Information sharing is the imperative aspect because it facilitates to work with integration
and support Corporation to achieve specified objectives on right time. Saudi organizations
generally want effective information sharing among groups so that issues related to workplace
can be sorted out in relatively less time span (Alatawi, Dwivedi & Rana, 2014).Here, I through
the knowledge sharing culture, support organization to achieve their long as well as short term
objectives. For this purpose, effective mode of communication like formal and informal must be
ensured in proper manner. For example, if company uses social media for employee engagement,
then it tends to motivate workforce. Similarly, informal meeting can promote knowledge sharing
culture. It is because by working in Saudi Aramco, I found that company can put efforts on
employee motivation. At this juncture, monetary and non-monetary rewards prove to be effective
for increasing level of motivation. It will assist personnel to support management by providing
their valuable suggestions. However, I found appropriate as well to conduct formal meeting
wherein workforce are provided detail information related to expansion and growth of company.
In addition to this, work can be allocated in team and rewards should be set for success of entire
team. It will help personnel to work with integration and share their ideas in quick manner
(Kimble, Grenier & Goglio-Primard, 2010).
Way to generate Idea
From the information included in the module, it was found that people working in Saudi
Arabian companies have focused towards generating an idea from a large group (Butterfield,
2013). In my organization, technology has become the most crucial aspect for generating ideas.
However, most of the times, we conduct brainstorming for the purpose of making innovation into
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working style and resolving the problem that are faced in working patterns. In the brain storming
session, all my team members went for a meeting in which individual come up with their own
innovative idea ideas. Nonetheless, in the present scenario, my company has adopted technical
aspects of generating ideas for resolving the problems. In the secondary information, I found that
most of the companies in South Africa are focused towards Crowdsourcing in which the large
group of people approached to the companies for solving problems. The online communities
(visitors to blogs or websites) are asked for provide a solution for the problem faced by them.
My organization is also looking for the technical aspects that are to be included in the process of
generating ideas. In the aspect of Crowdsourcing, whenever company has a problem, it goes for
broadcasting on online portals. Further, in the process, Online “Crowd” submits solutions in
which the company and online groups went to submit the solutions jointly. The concept can be
applied to my workplace that will increase the effectiveness of idea and will provide more
benefits to the company.
CONCLUSION
In the above report, I made a personal Analysis of my experience as working in a team
at Saudi Aramco Company. Here, I conclude that, team support is must for identifying where we
are lacking and where can we put efforts to resolve the issues. In addition, I suggest my
organization for making use of Crowdsourcing, to get solution on problems.
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REFERENCES
Alatawi, F. M., Dwivedi, Y. K., & Rana, N. P. (2014). Conceptual model for examining
knowledge management system (KMS) adoption in public sector organizations in Saudi
Arabia. Paper presented at tGov Workshop ’12 , London, UK. Retrieved from
Butterfield, J. (2013) Problem solving and decision making (2nd ed.). Independence, KY:
Cengage Publishers.
Cyr, S., & Wei Choo, C. (2010). The individual and social dynamics of knowledge sharing: an
exploratory study. Journal of Documentation. 66(6). 824-846.
Kimble, C., Grenier, C., & Goglio-Primard, K. (2010). Innovation and knowledge sharing across
professional boundaries: Political interplay between boundary objects and
brokers. International Journal of Information Management. 30(5). 437-444.
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