PMP People — Leading Projects Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✓

  Facilitate a team retrospective where members can discuss collaboration norms and decision-making processes

  Why this is correct

  In an agile context, facilitating a team retrospective is the most effective approach for a self-organizing team to address internal collaboration challenges. This structured event provides a safe space for all members to transparently discuss emerging issues, such as dominant behaviors, and collectively define or refine their collaboration norms and decision-making processes. By empowering the team to identify solutions and commit to actionable improvements, it reinforces self-management and fosters a healthier, more inclusive working environment. This aligns with the agile principle of continuous improvement and team empowerment.

• ✗

  Ignore the behavior as long as the team is still delivering

  Why it's wrong here

  Ignoring disruptive team dynamics, even if current delivery metrics appear unaffected, is a significant anti-pattern in agile environments. While short-term output might persist, unaddressed issues like dominant behavior inevitably lead to decreased team morale, disengagement among other members, and a decline in psychological safety. This approach undermines the principles of sustainable pace and continuous improvement, ultimately jeopardizing long-term team health, innovation, and overall velocity as trust erodes and conflicts fester beneath the surface.

• ✗

  Reassign tasks to ensure equal participation by controlling the workload

  Why it's wrong here

  Directly reassigning tasks to enforce equal participation, while seemingly addressing the symptom, fundamentally undermines the agile principle of team self-organization. This top-down intervention removes autonomy from the team, potentially causing resentment among members who prefer to self-select work based on skills and interest. Such an action can stifle initiative, reduce ownership, and prevent the team from developing its own solutions to internal challenges, thereby hindering its maturity and ability to adapt collaboratively.

• ✗

  Speak privately with the dominating team member and ask them to step back

  Why it's wrong here

  Speaking privately with an individual team member to address dominating behavior is a managerial intervention that only targets a symptom, not the underlying team dynamics or systemic issues. While it might temporarily curb one person's behavior, it bypasses the team's collective responsibility to establish and enforce its own norms and does not empower the team to resolve its own conflicts. This approach fails to foster psychological safety for open discussion and prevents the team from developing robust, shared collaboration agreements that benefit everyone.

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