Situational Judgement Test Navigating Team Dynamics 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: You discover that two team members have been withholding information from each other due to a past disagreement, which is now harming project quality. What is the FIRST step?
- Reassign one of them to a different project to remove the friction.
- Meet with each person separately to understand the origin of the conflict before facilitating a joint conversation. (Correct answer)
- Send the whole team an email emphasizing the importance of information sharing.
- Report the situation to HR as a conduct issue.
Correct answer: Meet with each person separately to understand the origin of the conflict before facilitating a joint conversation.
Understanding each person's perspective individually before a joint meeting increases the likelihood of a genuine resolution.
Question 2: Your team consistently agrees in meetings but then works in different directions afterward. What is the MOST likely root cause to address?
- Team members are deliberately being deceptive and should be disciplined.
- Decisions lack explicit documentation and individual ownership, causing drift during execution. (Correct answer)
- Meetings are too short and should be extended.
- Team members do not trust leadership and are passively resisting.
Correct answer: Decisions lack explicit documentation and individual ownership, causing drift during execution.
Undocumented decisions with no named owners are the most common cause of post-meeting misalignment and divergent execution.
Question 3: A teammate is visibly overwhelmed and has started missing deadlines, affecting team delivery. As a peer, what is the MOST appropriate action?
- Take over all their tasks without asking to prevent further delays.
- Check in privately to ask if they are okay, offer specific help, and suggest they communicate with the manager about capacity. (Correct answer)
- Escalate to the manager immediately without speaking to the colleague first.
- Tell other team members to cover for them informally until things improve.
Correct answer: Check in privately to ask if they are okay, offer specific help, and suggest they communicate with the manager about capacity.
A private, empathetic check-in with a concrete offer of help and a nudge toward manager communication addresses both the human and the delivery risk.
Question 4: During a cross-functional project, your team's priorities conflict with those of a partner team, causing delays. Neither manager has intervened. What should you do?
- Deprioritize the partner team's needs and focus solely on your own team's goals.
- Initiate a direct conversation with the partner team's point of contact to map the conflict and explore trade-offs. (Correct answer)
- Wait for a manager to notice and intervene before taking any action.
- Escalate to senior leadership immediately to force a resolution.
Correct answer: Initiate a direct conversation with the partner team's point of contact to map the conflict and explore trade-offs.
Peer-level direct conversation to map the conflict is faster than waiting for management and avoids unnecessary escalation.
Question 5: You are the most senior person in a team meeting but not the official lead. The team is deadlocked on a decision and looking to you for direction. What is MOST appropriate?
- Make the decision unilaterally to move things forward since the team expects it.
- Defer entirely, saying it's not your role to make decisions as a non-lead.
- Facilitate the group toward a decision by surfacing key criteria and trade-offs without imposing your view. (Correct answer)
- Suggest the team vote on the options to remove pressure from yourself.
Correct answer: Facilitate the group toward a decision by surfacing key criteria and trade-offs without imposing your view.
Using your seniority to facilitate rather than dictate preserves team ownership of the decision while breaking the deadlock effectively.
Question 6: A long-standing team norm has become inefficient, but most members follow it out of habit without questioning it. How do you best drive change?
- Ignore the norm yourself and hope others follow your example.
- Raise the inefficiency with data in a retrospective, propose a trial alternative, and agree on success criteria. (Correct answer)
- Complain about the norm informally with sympathetic colleagues to build opposition.
- Ask management to mandate a change top-down without involving the team.
Correct answer: Raise the inefficiency with data in a retrospective, propose a trial alternative, and agree on success criteria.
Raising an issue with evidence, proposing a trial, and agreeing on success criteria is the most structured and team-inclusive approach to changing norms.
Question 7: Your team is celebrating a major success, but one member who contributed significantly was on leave during the final push and feels left out of the recognition. What should you do?
- Nothing — they weren't there for the final delivery so the recognition was appropriate.
- Acknowledge their contributions explicitly in a team communication and ensure they are included in any future recognition events. (Correct answer)
- Tell them privately that their contribution mattered but avoid raising it with the team.
- Ask the manager to issue a separate award so the main celebration isn't revisited.
Correct answer: Acknowledge their contributions explicitly in a team communication and ensure they are included in any future recognition events.
Explicitly naming a contributor's role in a team communication ensures their contribution is visible without diminishing the broader celebration.
Situational Judgement Test Navigating Team Dynamics 4
You discover that two team members have been withholding information from each other due to a past disagreement, which is now harming project quality.
What is the FIRST step?