Management Course: Discussion Topic 5
jandreg
chap008.pptTeam
Dynamics
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
McShane/Von Glinow OB 5e
Copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Teams at Whole Foods Markets
Whole Foods Markets organizes employees around self-directed teams, responsible for a particular store area. These teams have considerable autonomy to operate their store section.
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What are Teams?
- Groups of two or more people
- Exist to fulfill a purpose
- Interdependent -- interact and influence each other
- Mutually accountable for achieving common goals
- Perceive themselves as a social entity
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Many Types of Teams
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| Departmental teams Production/service/ leadership teams Self-directed teams Advisory teams | Task force (project) teams Skunkworks Virtual teams Communities of practice |
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Informal Groups
- Groups that exist primarily for the benefit of their members
- Reasons why informal groups exist:
Innate drive to bond
Social identity -- we define ourselves by group memberships
Goal accomplishment
Emotional support
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Advantages and Disadvantages of Teams
Advantages
- Make better decisions, products/services
- Better information sharing
- Higher employee motivation/engagement
- Fulfills drive to bond
- Closer scrutiny by team members
- Team members are benchmarks of comparison
Disadvantages
- Individuals better/faster on some tasks
- Process losses - cost of developing and maintaining teams
- Social loafing
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How to Minimize Social Loafing
- Make individual performance more visible
- Form smaller teams
- Specialize tasks
- Measure individual performance
- Increase employee motivation
- Increase job enrichment
- Select motivated employees
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Team Effectiveness Model
Organizational
and Team
Environment
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- Task characteristics
- Team size
- Team composition
Team Design
- Accomplish tasks
- Satisfy member
needs - Maintain team
survival
Team
Effectiveness
- Team development
- Team norms
- Team cohesiveness
- Team trust
Team Processes
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Organization/Team Environment
- Reward systems
- Communication systems
- Organizational structure
- Organizational leadership
- Physical space
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Team’s Task Characteristics
- Teams work better when tasks are clear, easy to implement
- learn roles faster, easier to become cohesive
- ill-defined tasks require members with diverse backgrounds and more time to coordinate
- Teams preferred with higher task interdependence
- Extent that employees need to share materials, information, or expertise to perform their jobs.
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Levels of Task Interdependence
Sequential
Pooled
Reciprocal
High
Low
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Resource
A
B
C
A
B
C
A
B
C
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Team Size
- Smaller teams are better because:
- need less time to coordinate roles and resolve differences
- require less time to develop more member involvement, thus higher commitment
- But team must be large enough to accomplish task
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Shell Looks for Team Players
Shell holds the 5-day Gourami Business Challenge in Europe, North America, and Asia to observe how well the university students work in teams. One of the greatest challenges is for students from different cultures and educational specializations to work together.
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Team Composition
- Effective team members must be willing and able to work on the team
- Effective team members possess specific competencies (5 C’s)
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Five C’s of Team Member Competencies
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Team Composition: Diversity
- Team members have with diverse knowledge, skills, perspectives, values, etc.
- Advantages
- better for creatively solving complex problems
- broader knowledge base
- better representation of team’s constituents
- Disadvantages
- take longer to become a high-performing team
- more susceptible to “faultlines”
- increased risk of dysfunctional conflict
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Forming
Stages of Team Development
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Existing teams might regress back to an earlier stage of development
Storming
Norming
Performing
Adjourning
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Team Development as Membership and Competence
Two central processes in team development
Team membership formation
- Transition from “them” to “us”
- Team becomes part of person’s social identity
Team competence development
- Forming routines with others
- Forming shared mental models
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Team Roles
- A set of behaviors that people are expected to perform
- Some formally assigned; others informally
- Informal role assignment occurs during team development and is related to personal characteristics
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Team Building
Formal activities intended to improve the team’s development and functioning
- Types of Team Building
- Clarify team’s performance goals
- Improve team’s problem-solving skills
- Improve role definitions
- Improve relations
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Team Norms
- Informal rules and shared expectations team establishes to regulate member behaviors
- Norms develop through:
- Initial team experiences
- Critical events in team’s history
- Experience/values members bring to the team
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Preventing/Changing Dysfunctional Team Norms
- State desired norms when forming teams
- Select members with preferred values
- Discuss counter-productive norms
- Reward behaviors representing desired norms
- Disband teams with dysfunctional norms
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Team Cohesion
- The degree of attraction people feel toward the team and their motivation to remain members
- Both cognitive and emotional process
- Related to the team member’s social identity
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Team
size
Member
interaction
• Smaller teams tend to be more cohesive
• Regular interaction increases cohesion
• Calls for tasks with high interdependence
Member
similarity
• Similarity-attraction effect
• Some forms of diversity have less effect
Influences on Team Cohesion
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Team
success
External challenges
• Successful teams fulfillmember needs
• Success increases social identity with team
• Challenges increase cohesion when not
overwhelming
Somewhat difficult entry
• Team eliteness increases cohesion
• But lower cohesion with severe initiation
Influences on Team Cohesion (con’t)
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Team Cohesion Outcomes
Motivated to remain members
Willing to share information
Strong interpersonal bonds
Resolve conflict effectively
Better interpersonal relationships
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Team Norms Support Company
Goals
Team Norms Oppose Company
Goals
High Team Cohesiveness
Low Team Cohesiveness
Team Cohesion and Performance
Low task
performance
Moderately
high task
performance
Moderately
low task
performance
High task
performance
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Trust Defined
Positive expectations one person has of another person in situations involving risk
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Three Levels of Trust
Identification-based Trust
Knowledge-based Trust
Calculus-based Trust
High
Low
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Self-Directed Teams at Reckitt Benckiser
Reckitt Benckiser Healthcare has become one of the most productive pharmaceutical operations in Europe due to lean management practices and reliance on self-directed teams.
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Self-Directed Teams Defined
Cross-functional work groups organized around work processes, that complete an entire piece of work requiring several interdependent tasks, and that have substantial autonomy over the execution of those tasks.
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Self-Directed Team Success Factors
- Responsible for entire work process
- High interdependence within the team
- Low interdependence with other teams
- Autonomy to organize and coordinate work
- Technology supports team communication/coordination
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Virtual Teams
Teams whose members operate across space, time, and organizational boundaries and are linked through information technologies to achieve organizational tasks
- Increasingly possible because of:
- Information technologies
- Knowledge-based work
- Increasingly necessary because of:
- Organizational learning
- Globalization
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Virtual Team Success Factors
- Member characteristics
- Technology savvy
- Self-leadership skills
- Emotional intelligence
- Flexible use of communication technologies
- Opportunities to meet face-to-face
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Team Decision Making Constraints
- Time constraints
- Time to organize/coordinate
- Production blocking
- Evaluation apprehension
- Belief that others are silently evaluating you
- Peer pressure to conform
- Suppressing opinions that oppose team norms
- Groupthink
- Tendency in highly cohesive teams to value consensus at the price of decision quality
- Concept losing favor -- consider more specific features
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General Guidelines for Team Decisions
- Team norms should encourage critical thinking
- Sufficient team diversity
- Ensure neither leader nor any member dominates
- Maintain optimal team size
- Introduce effective team structures
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Constructive Conflict
- People focus their discussion on the issue while maintaining respectfulness for others having different points of view.
- Problem: constructive conflict easily slides into personal attacks
Courtesy of Johnson Space Center/NASA
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Rules of Brainstorming
Speak freely
Don’t criticize
Provide as many ideas as possible
Build on others’ ideas
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Evaluating Brainstorming
- Strengths
- Produces more creative ideas
- Less evaluation apprehension when team supports a learning orientation
- Strengthens decision acceptance and team cohesiveness
- Sharing positive emotions encourages creativity
- Weaknesses
- Production blocking still exists
- Evaluation apprehension exists in many groups
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Electronic Brainstorming
- Relies on networked computers to submit and share creative ideas
- Strengths -- more creative ideas, minimal production blocking, evaluation apprehension, or conformity problems
- Limitations -- too structured and technology-bound
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Describe
problem
Nominal Group Technique
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Individual
Activity
Team
Activity
Individual
Activity
Write down
possible
solutions
Possible
solutions
described
to others
Vote on
solutions
presented
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Team
Dynamics
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McGraw-Hill/Irwin
McShane/Von Glinow OB 5e
Copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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