In Remember the Titans the football team of T.C. Williams had gotten a new coach, and a federal mandate to integrate the teams. This caused many issues within the team (The movie takes place in the ’70s in Virginia. Diversity and acceptance between the races had still not been well from our past time) the players did not like each other and that made them not to keen on joining a team and working together. Relating OB to this in the movie job performance as it is referred to in the workplace or team and task performance was affected heavily due to these factors.
Job performance comes from a variety of different sources stemmed from small interactions and emotions. At the beginning of the movie when they first integrated to become a team you could see the notable change in their effort and performance. Motivation is a huge part of job performance when they combined they had many surface-level differences that they refused to get past and wouldn’t work as a team.
This can be described best as being associated with the “Social identity theory” which is defined as “A theory that people identify themselves based on the various groups on which they belong and judge others based on the groups they associate with.” (Colquitt et al. 2019) Within the team they all had their own individual goals which aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but when those goals take away from the big picture which is team success it really derails the team and doesn’t allow for them to win.
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The whole team was just fighting each other for positions within the team just to prove they could beat their own teammate. That was clearly an issue, and their Coach, Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) noticed this happening. He takes the whole team on a trip to Gettysburg College where they had training camp. At the beginning of the camp, they had a lot of clashing due to racially charged moments including both of the team captains (Gerry Bertier and Julius Campbell).
Boone made all of the boys switch up roommates throughout the week to get them to get to know each other and learn to overcome their racial differences. The whole team continued to stay on the team through effective commitment which is “An employee’s desire to remain a member of an organization due to a feeling of emotional attachment.”(Colquitt et al. 2019)
The athletes who were on the team previously had won a lot and had those championships to build on. While the athletes joining had the emotional attachment to do well and prove themselves. Throughout the week at their training camp, Boone worked them hard and forced them to work as a team. He was showing major desire for his team to bond well together while overcoming their racial differences to be a cohesive unit.
The coaching staff weren’t the only leaders, the athletes had to take leadership for this to work out. The influence was a major part of what was happening on the team. As defined by McGraw hill Influence is “The use of behaviors to cause behavioral or attitudinal changes in others.” (Colquitt et al. 2019) Gary and Julius acted as leaders for both groups (White and Black) to start modeling behaviors that eventually caught on with the others. The team began to work together with each other to complete the training (tasks) that the coaching staff gave them. And that showed major improvement in the team dynamics and interpersonal communications.
When they had returned back from training camp they had all become an actual team, they played their first game and won it, through this they began to gain confidence and trust in each other. During practices, they would start to work harder because they believed in themselves and their teammates this relates to the Expectancy theory “A theory that describes the cognitive process employees go through to make choices among different voluntary responses.” (Colquitt et al. 2019). This theory really just means a high level of effort = high level of performance.
Once the boys got past their racial prejudices they were able to focus on the game and becoming a championship level team and they knew that the harder they practiced and the closer they became would top that of other teams and allow them to win the championships and be a team that makes history. Faculty from the school had told Boone that if they lost a game that he would be fired. The fact that their coach who brought them together would get fired gives them another incentive.
