Team Concepts

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• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing
• Adjourning

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• Forming

Primary concern is the initial entry of members to a group

Defining roles, Determining group’s task

• Storming

Period of high emotion and tension among the members

Member expectations need to be clarified

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• Norming

Group begins to come together as a coordinated unit

Group tries to regulate behavior

• Performing

Emergence of a mature, organized and well-functioning team

• Adjourning

Completing the task and ending the team

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• Norms = rules or standards of behavior (often unwritten)

Prescriptive Norms

Dictate what should be done

Proscriptive Norms

Dictate behaviors that should be avoided

Describe the norms of this class.

Describe the norms in your of friends.

Question ???

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Two types of team rewards

• Cooperative

Distributed equally

• Competitive

Distributed based on

individual performance

Appropriateness depends on degree of task interdependence

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Teams get too big

Casual or convenient team assignments

Inattention to results

Absence of commitment and trust

Unclear or diluted accountability

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• Risky shift

People in groups tend to make more extreme decisions than individuals do

Could be riskier, could be more risk-averse

• Innocent bystander

People in a group often feel diffusion of responsibility because others are available to act

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• Choking

Pressure of others can lead to performance decrement (particularly likely when people are not experts at the task)

Social facilitation = when individual motivation and performance is enhanced by others

• Escalation of commitment

Persisting with a losing course of action, even in the face of clear evidence of their folly

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• Conformity and Obedience

Individuals often leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy (particularly in crisis and when the individual lacks expertise)

Milgram experiments on obedience to authority

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People are remarkably poor at taking the perspective of others

A minority of the group tends to do the majority of talking, leading to uneven communication

People are likely to discuss information they share rather than unique information they might have

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• Social Loafing

“Free riding”

• Ringelmann Effect

Situation in which some people do not work as hard in groups as they do individually

• “Sucker aversion”

To avoid being taken advantage of, some team members hedge their efforts and wait to see what other members will do

• Identifiability

Displaying each member’s contribution to a task

One of the best ways to combat social loafing

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• Self-limiting behavior

Occurs whenever team members choose to limit their involvement in the team’s work

Unlike social loafing, team members overtly reduce their involvement

Have you ever engaged in self-limiting behaviors

while working on a team? Why or why not?

Question ???

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• Members strive so hard to maintain harmony and cohesion that they end up avoiding the discomforts of disagreement
• Groupthink = the tendency of members in highly cohesive teams to lose their critical evaluative capabilities

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• Form of social conformity related to groupthink

Parable in which four people who do not want to go to Abilene all voluntarily go simply because they thought that is what everyone else wanted to do

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• Holding Effective Meetings

1) Ask what are the 2 or 3 most important things that need to get done

2) Determine how much time everyone has

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• Understanding Member Profiles

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a common assessment of one’s personality preferences.

Can help in teams by…

Identifying sources of conflict

Understanding communication patterns

Distributing work according to preferences

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• Building Team Cohesion

Cohesiveness = the degree to which members are attracted to, and motivated to remain part of, a group

The more difficult it is to get into a group, the more cohesive it tends to become

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Performance

Group Cohesion

Low

High

Norms that Encourage Performance

Norms that Discourage Performance

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• Great teams have “productive failures” that are seen as opportunities for growth

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• 1) Correctly state the issue in terms of behaviors not generalizations about traits
• 2) Ask yourself whether it is legitimate to give feedback
• 3) Consider whether you have a balanced set of facts
• 4) Create spoken norms so expectations are clear
• 5) Social contracting = Agree on goals, tasks and consequences of not doing the work

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• Creativity = bringing new ideas into existence
• Critical factors for promoting creativity in teams:

1) Climate of trust and risk taking

2) Disciplined use of creative problem-solving and processes

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• See mistakes as learning experiences
• Avoid “idea killer” phrases

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• Convergent thinking = starting with a defined problem and finding the single best (correct) answer)
• Divergent thinking = producing multiple or alternative answers from available information

Subdivision

Using analogies

Reversing the problem

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• Advantages

Save time and travel

Accommodates personal and professional lives

Brings together people from different locations

• Five fundamental disciplines of high performance teams are even more important in virtual teams

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• Advantages:

Speed, anonymity, honesty

Can be faster than face-to-face meetings

• Disadvantages:

Not good for establishing relationships

Hard to deal with sensitive issues

Harder to persuade team to fully commit

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• Abilene paradox
• Activity-based goals
• Adjourning stage
• Analogies
• Choking
• Competitive team rewards
• Convergent thinking
• Cooperative team rewards
• Diffusion of responsibility
• Divergent thinking
• Escalation of commitment
• Forming stage
• Groupthink
• Identifiability
• Innocent bystander effect
• Norming stage

• Norms
• Outcome-based goals
• Performing stage
• Reversing the problem
• Ringelmann effect
• Risky shift
• Self-limiting behavior
• Social conformity
• Social contracting
• Social facilitation
• Social loafing
• Storming stage
• Subdivision
• Team
• Virtual teams