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Table 2.1 Differences between groups and teams

Group Team or work group

Indeterminate size Restricted in size Common interests Common overarching objectives Sense of being part of something or seen as being part of something

Interaction between members to accomplish individual and group goals

Interdependent as much as individuals might wish to be Interdependency between members to accomplish individual and group goals

May have no responsibilities other than a sense of belonging to the group

Shared responsibilities

May have no accountabilities other than ‘contractual’ ones

Individual accountabilities

A group does not necessarily have any work to do or goals to accomplish

The team works together, physically or virtually

A group is a collection of individuals who draw a boundary around themselves. Or perhaps we from the outside might draw a boundary around them and thus define them as a group. A team on the other hand, with its common purpose, is generally tighter and clearer about what it is and what its raison d’être is. Its members know exactly who is involved and what their goal is. Of course it turns out that we are speaking hypothetically here, as any one of us has seen teams within organizations that appear to have no sense at all of what they are really about!

Let us illustrate the difference between a team and a group by using an example. We might look into an organization and see the Finance Department. The Finance Controller heads up a Finance Management Team that leads, manages and coordinates the activities within this area. The team members work together on common goals, meet regularly and have clearly defined roles and responsibilities (usually).

Perhaps the senior management team has decreed that all the high-potential managers in the organization shall be members of the Strategic Management Group. So the finance controller, who is on the high-potential

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list, gets together with others at his or her level to form a collection of individuals who contribute to the overall strategic direction of the organization. Apart from gatherings every six months, this group rarely meets or communicates. It is a grouping, which might be bounded but does not have any ongoing goals or objectives that require members to work together.

STOP AND THINK!

Q 2.1 Within your working life, what teams are you a member of and to which groups do you belong? Q 2.2 Within your personal life, what teams are you a member of and to which groups do you

belong?

Q 2.3 In what ways was it easier to answer in your personal life, and in what ways more difficult?

WHY WE NEED TEAMS

Why do we need teams and teamworking? Casey (1993), from Ashridge Management College, researched this question by asking a simple question of each team he worked with: ‘Why should you work together as a team?’ The simplest answer is, ‘Because of the work we need to accomplish.’ Teamwork may be needed because there is a high volume of interconnected pieces of work, or because the work is too complex to be understood and worked on by one person.

What about managers? Do they need to operate as teams, or can they operate effectively as groups? The Ashridge-based writers say that a management team does not necessarily have to be fully integrated as a team all of the time. Nor should it be reduced to a mere collection of individuals going about their own individual functional tasks.

Casey believes that there is a clear link between the level of uncertainty of the task being handled and the level of teamwork needed. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for teamwork. The majority of management teams deal with both uncertain and certain tasks, so need to be flexible about the levels of teamworking required. Decisions about health and safety, HR policy, reporting processes and recruitment are relatively

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certain, so can be handled fairly quickly without a need for much sharing of points of view. There is usually a right answer to these issues, whereas decisions about strategy, structure and culture are less certain. There is no right answer, and each course of action involves taking a risk. This means more teamworking, more sharing of points of view, and a real understanding of what is being agreed and what the implications are for the team.

THE TYPES OF ORGANIZATIONAL TEAMS

Robert Keidal (1984) identified a parallel between sports teams and organizational teams. He uses baseball, American football and basketball teams to show the differences.

A baseball team is like a sales organization. Team members are relatively independent of one another, and while all members are required to be on the field together, they virtually never interact together all at the same time.

Football is quite different. There are really three subteams within the total team: offence, defence and the special team. When the subteam is on the field, every player is involved in every play, which is not the case in baseball. But the teamwork is centred in the subteam, not the total team.

Basketball is a different breed. Here the team is small, with all players in only one team. Every player is involved in all aspects of the game, offence and defence, and all must pass, run, shoot. When a substitute comes in, all must play with the new person.

Many different types of team exist within organizations. Let us look at a range of types of team found in today’s organizations (see Table 2.2).

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Table 2.2 Types of team

Team Group Work Parallel Project Continuity Variable Stable Stable or one-off project Focused on project

achievement Lifespan Variable Unlimited Variable Time limited Organizational links

Can be part of the formal and/or informal organization

Part of management structure

Outside of normal management structure

Separate management structure

Led by Dependent on nature and purpose of group

One manager or supervisor

Normally coordinated or facilitated

Project manager

Location Variable Co-located Converge for meetings Co-located, dispersed, virtual

Purpose Variable Business as usual Maintenance function or part of change infrastructure

Change or development

Authority Dependent on nature and purpose of group

Through the line Depends Via project manager and project sponsor

Focus Communication Task Communication Task

Team Matrix Virtual Network Management Change

Continuity Stable as a structure but fluid by project

Potential fluid Potential fluid Stable Fluid

Lifespan Unlimited Variable Variable Unlimited Variable Organizational links

Part of management structure Dual accountability

Can be part of the management structure

More distributed across the organization

Part of management structure

Variable

Led by Project manager and functional head

One manager or supervisor

Potentially distributed leadership or coordination

One manager Sponsor or change manager

Location Co-located, dispersed, virtual

Dispersed Dispersed Often co-located Co-located, dispersed, virtual

Purpose Project achievement

BAU or Project Change or development

Business as usual Change and development

Change and development

Authority Dual accountability

Through the line or project manager

Depends Through the line Via project manager and project sponsor

Focus Task Task Communication

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Team Matrix Virtual Network Management Change Task and communication

Task and communication

Work team

Work teams or work groups are typically the type of team that most people within organizations will think of when we talk about teams. They are usually part of the normal hierarchical structure of an organization. This means that one person manages a group of individuals, and that person is responsible for delivering a particular product or service either to the customer or to another part of the organization.

These teams tend to be relatively stable in terms of team objectives, processes and personnel. Their agenda is normally focused on maintenance and management of what is. This is a combination of existing processes and operational strategy. Any change agenda they have is usually on top of their existing agenda of meeting the current operating plan.

Self-managed team

A sub-set of the work team is the self-managed team. The self-managed team has the attributes of the work team but without a direct manager or

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supervisor. This affects the way decisions are made and the way in which individual and team performance is managed. Generally this is through collective or distributed leadership.

Self-managed work teams are more prevalent in manufacturing industries than in the service arena. Once again there is an emphasis on delivery of service or product rather than delivering change.

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Parallel team

Parallel teams are different from work teams because they are not part of the traditional management hierarchy. They are run in tandem or parallel to this structure. Examples of parallel teams are:

• teams brought together to deliver quality improvement (for example, quality circles, continuous improvement groups);

• teams that have some problem-solving or decision-making input, other than the normal line management processes (for example, creativity and innovation groups);

• teams formed to involve and engage employees (for example, staff councils, diagonal slice groups);

• teams set up for a specific purpose such as a task force looking at an office move.

These teams have variable longevity, and are used for purposes that tend to be other than the normal ‘business as usual’ management. They are often of a consultative nature, carrying limited authority. Although not necessarily responsible or accountable for delivering changes, they often feed into a change management process.

Project team

Project teams are teams that are formed for the specific purpose of completing a project. They therefore are time limited, and we would expect to find clarity of objectives. The project might be focused on an external client or it might be an internal one-off, or cross-cutting project with an internal client group.

Depending on the scale of the project the team might comprise individuals on a full- or part-time basis. Typically there is a project manager, selected for his or her specialist or managerial skills, and a project sponsor. Individuals report to the project manager for the duration of the project (although if they work part-time on the project they might also be reporting to a line manager). The project manager reports to the project sponsor, who typically is a senior manager.

We know the project team has been successful when it delivers the specific project on time, to quality and within budget. Brown and Eisenhardt (1995) noted that cross-functional teams, which are teams

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comprised of individuals from a range of organizational functions, were found to enhance project success.

Project teams are very much associated with implementing change. However, although change may be their very raison d’être it does not necessarily mean that their members’ ability to handle change is any different from the rest of us. Indeed built into their structure are potential dysfunctionalities:

• The importance of task achievement often reigns supreme, at the expense of investing time in meeting individual and team maintenance needs.

• The fact that individuals have increased uncertainty concerning their future can impact on motivation and performance.

• The dynamic at play between the project team and the organizational area into which the change will take place can be problematic.

Matrix team

Matrix teams generally occur in organizations that are run along project lines. The organization typically has to deliver a number of projects to achieve its objectives. Each project has a project manager, but the project team members are drawn from functional areas of the organization. Often projects are clustered together to form programmes, or indeed whole divisions or business units (for example, aerospace, defence or oil industry projects). Thus the team members have accountability both to the project manager and to their functional head. The balance of power between the projects and the functions varies from organization to organization, and the success of such structures often depends on the degree to which the project teams are enabled by the structure and the degree to which they are disabled.

Virtual team

Increasing globalization and developments in the use of new technologies mean that teams are not necessarily co-located any more. This has been true for many years for sales teams. Virtual teams either never meet or they meet only rarely. Townsend et al (1998) defined virtual teams as ‘groups of geographically and/or organizationally dispersed co-workers that are assembled using a combination of telecommunications

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and information technologies to accomplish an organizational task’. An advantage of virtual teams is that an organization can use the most appropriately skilled people for the task, wherever they are located. In larger companies the probability that the necessary and desired expertise for any sophisticated or complex task is in the same place geographically is low.

Disadvantages spring from the distance between team members. Virtual teams cross time zones, countries, continents and cultures. All these things create their own set of challenges. Current research suggests that synchronous working (face-to-face or remote) is more effective in meeting more complex challenges. Team leadership for virtual teams also creates its own issues, with both day-to- day management tasks and developmental interventions being somewhat harder from a distance.

When it comes to change, virtual teams are somewhat paradoxical. Team members can perhaps be more responsive, balancing autonomy and interdependence, and more focused on their part of the team objective. However, change creates an increased need for communication, clear goals, defined roles and responsibilities, and support and recognition processes. These things are more difficult to manage in the virtual world.

Erich Barthel (Building relationships and working in teams across cultures) and Inger Buus (Leading in a virtual environment) write about this in more detail in Leadership and Personal Development (2011).

Networked team

National, international and global organizations can use networked teams in an attempt to add a greater cohesion, which would not otherwise be there. Additionally they may wish to capture learning in one part and spread it across the whole organization.

We might have grouped virtual and networked teams under the same category. However, we could think of the networked team as being similar to a parallel team, in the sense that its primary purpose is not business as usual, but part of an attempt by the organization to increase sustainability and build capacity through increasing the reservoir of knowledge across the whole organization.

Networked teams are an important anchor for organizations in times of change. They can be seen as part of the glue that gives a sense of cohesion to people within the organization.

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Management team

Management teams coordinate and provide direction to the sub-units under their jurisdiction, laterally integrating interdependent sub-units across key business processes.

(Mohrman et al, 1995)

The management team is ultimately responsible for the overall performance of the business unit. In itself it may not deliver any product, service or project, but clearly its function is to enable that delivery. Management teams are pivotal in translating the organization’s overarching goals into specific objectives for the various sub-units to do their share of the organization task.

Management teams are similar to work teams in terms of delivery of current operational plan, but are much more likely to be in a position of designing and delivering change as well. We expect a more senior management team to spend less time on ‘business as usual’ matters and more time on the change agenda.

The senior management team in any organization is the team most likely to be held responsible for the organization’s ultimate success or failure. It is in a pivotal position within the organization. On the one hand it is at the top of the organization, and therefore team members have a collective leadership responsibility; on the other, it is accountable to the non-executive board and shareholders in limited companies, or to politicians in local and central government, or to trustees in not-for-profit organizations. Along with the change team (see below) the management team has a particular role to play within most change scenarios, for it is its members who initiate and manage the implementation of change.

Change team

Change teams are often formed within organizations when a planned or unplanned change of significant proportions is necessary. We have separated out this type of team because of its special significance. Sometimes the senior management team is called the change team, responsible for directing and sponsoring the changes. Sometimes the change team is a special project team set up to implement change. At other times the change team is a parallel team, set up to tap into the organization and be a conduit for feedback as to how the changes are being received.

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Obviously different organizations have different terminologies, so what in one organization is called a project team delivering a change will be a change team delivering a project in another organization.

More and more organizations also realize that the management of change is more likely to succeed if attention is given to the people side of change. Hence a parallel team drawn from representatives of the whole workforce can be a useful adjunct in terms of assessing and responding to the impact of the changes on people.

We see the change team as an important starting point in the change process. Research by one of the authors (Green, 2007a) and Prosci (2003, 2007) suggests the criticality of a credible effective dedicated change management team.

STOP AND THINK!

Q 2.4 Of the teams of which you are a member, which are more suitable to lead change and which more suitable to implement change? Justify your answer.

HOW TO IMPROVE TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

Rollin and Christine Glaser (1992) have identified five elements that contribute to the level of a team’s effectiveness or ineffectiveness over time. They are:

1. team mission, planning and goal setting; 2. team roles; 3. team operating processes; 4. team interpersonal relationships; and 5. inter-team relations.

If you can assess where a team is in terms of its ability to address these five elements, you will discover what it needs to do to develop into a fully functioning team.

Team mission planning and goal setting

A number of studies have found that the most effective teams have a strong sense of their purpose, organize their work around that purpose,

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