Chapter Review
What are teams and what are their various forms?
Teams are groups whose members are working together in the pursuit of a shared
goal.
Teamwork is the process used to combine (coordinate) members' efforts
effectively.
Teams have become increasingly popular as a means of organizing work in a
variety of settings.
Teams are needed when tasks are difficult, complex, and important, but the
popularity of teams is not consistent with their overall effectiveness (according to
the concept of the romance of teams ).
Types of teams include work, management, project, advisory teams, and self-
managing teams.
Hackman’s (2002) authority matrix model distinguishes between four types of
teams on the basis of their control over their processes and goals: manager-led,
self-managing, self-designing, and self-governing.
Members of cross-functional teams often serve as boundary spanners for the
organization.
Holacracy is a multiteam system that use teams (“circles”) for all organizational
functions.
The input–process–output (IPO) systems model guides much of the theoretical and
empirical study of teams.
How does the team’s composition influence its effectiveness?
Pisano, Bohmer, and Edmondson (2001) examined the performance of medical
teams and related their effectiveness to composition and design.
Conscientiousness and agreeableness are the two personality traits most closely
linked to team effectiveness, followed by extraversion, emotional stability, and
openness.
A configural approach to team composition assumes that each member’s fit within
the team depends on the personal qualities of the other individuals who are on the
team.
Members’ team orientation and their knowledge, skills, and abilities, or KSAs,
predict team effectiveness.
KSAs include both task competence and interpersonal skills.
Studies of highly successful teams suggest they were all staffed with highly
motivated, skilled experts, but including experts in groups does not assure that the
team will be effective.
Some groups may be, collectively, more intelligent than others, but the cause of
those variations is not yet known.
Individuals who function effectively in groups possess a working knowledge of
how teams work (team knowledge KSAs).
There are advantages and disadvantages associated with team diversity.
Diversity increases the team’s resources, but diverse groups may lack cohesion,
because their members may perceive each other as dissimilar. If cohesion is
essential for the group to succeed, a diverse group will be disadvantaged.
Crowdsourcing capitalizes on the creativity of diverse groups.
Wood’s (1987) meta-analysis of sex differences found that men and women do not
differ in their effectiveness as team members, disconfirming the male bonding
hypothesis.
Groups that include a lone representative of a particular social category (tokens, or
solos) may encounter problems of fairness, influence, and so on.
Hackman’s (1992) studies of performing orchestras indicate that the group’s
history and the larger social context in which the group is embedded influence the
impact of a group’s gender heterogeneity on performance.
What processes mediate the input–output relationship?
Interlocking interdependence promotes team performance by enhancing the
development of shared mental models and improving transactive memory systems.
Moreland and his associates (1996) examined the development of transactive
memory by training individuals either in groups or individually, and then
examining how much of that training transferred to a subsequent group situation.
Coordinated interaction is sustained by three key processes: transitioning, acting,
and managing interpersonal relations among members (Marks et al., 2001).
Hackman’s (2002) real team model stresses the unifying functions of a clear,
challenging, and consequential task.
Teams are well-structured groups, with clearly defined roles, norms, and
intermember relations.
Clarity of group structures enhances members’ sense of psychological safety
(Edmondson, 1999).
Effective teams are usually cohesive (social, task, collective, emotional, and
structural).
Cohesiveness promotes the exchange of information and trust, but cohesive teams
do not necessarily outperform less cohesive ones.
According to Fine, team members develop interpersonal trust over time as they
learn which members of their team can be trusted to perform their requisite tasks
adequately.
Research conducted by Jarvenpaa and her colleagues (2004) indicates that teams
that meet online rather than offline (e-teams or virtual teams) develop trust in a
manner consistent with the organizational trust model.
How effective are teams, and how can they be improved?
Team approaches do not ensure success, but they are reliably associated with
increases in effectiveness and member satisfaction.
Hackman (2002) identified three factors that define the success of a team: task
performance, adaptive growth of the team, and individual development of the
members.
The Pisano, Bohmer, and Edmondson (2001) study of surgical teams identified the
factors that promoted learning in some groups and reduced the learning capacity of
others.
The checkered success of team approaches is due, in part, to the failure to properly
design teams.
Salas and his colleagues (2007) have identified a number of ways to improve team
function and have developed team training and team building techniques that can
be used to teach team members the skills they need to perform more effectively in
groups.
Experience with past group-level methods, such as quality circles, suggests that
fidelity, training, and support are required to maximize effectiveness.
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