Work Teams and Groups Notes

9-1 Groups and Work Teams

• A group is formed when two or more people have common interests, objectives, and continuing interaction.
• A work team is a group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common mission, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.
• Groups emphasize individual leadership, personal accountability, and exclusive work products.
• Work teams emphasize shared leadership, mutual accountability, and collective work products.
• Work teams are task-oriented groups.
• Several kinds of work teams exist:
  • Some are like baseball teams in that members have set responsibilities.
  • Others are like football teams in that members have coordinated action.
  • Still others are like doubles tennis teams in that members have primary yet flexible responsibilities.
  • Some operate like groundskeeping crews in that all members work synergistically toward a single goal.
• All work teams need to attend to knowledge-based processes and interactions as well as contextual factors if they are to improvise effectively.
• Advanced computer and telecommunications technologies enable organizations to be more flexible through the use of virtual teams. Organizations use virtual teams to access expertise and the best employees around the world.

9-2 Why Work Teams?

• Teams are very useful in performing work that is complicated, fragmented, and/or more voluminous than one person can handle.
• Individual limitations can be overcome through teamwork and collaboration.
• In a global economy, organizations need to enable virtual and dispersed teams that work effectively.
• Global teams that are geographically dispersed work best when members display empathy, refrain from domineering behavior, maintain frequent contact, and offer feedback on interactions while allowing for some unstructured time for informal exchanges.

9-2a Benefits to Organizations

• Teams make the most significant contributions to organizations when members can put aside individual interests in favor of unity. This joint action is called teamwork.
• Complex, collaborative work tasks and activities tend to require considerable amounts of teamwork.
• When knowledge, talent, and abilities are dispersed across numerous workers and require an integrated effort for task accomplishment, teamwork is often the only solution.
• A movement toward team-oriented work environments has championed empowerment through collaboration rather than self-reliance and competition.
• Teams with experience working together may produce valuable innovations, and individual contributions within teams are valuable as well.
• A team-oriented work environment aligns with a significantly more empowered workforce.
• Teams must bring together members with different specialties and knowledge to work on complex problems. The ability to do so improves team performance and psychological well-being.

9-2b Psychosocial Benefits to Individuals

• Team or group members derive benefits from the collective experience of teamwork.
  • Benefits accrue from achieving psychological intimacy.
  • Benefits come from teamwork achieving integrated involvement.
• Psychological intimacy is emotional and psychological closeness to other team or group members.
  • It results in feelings of affection and warmth, unconditional positive regard, opportunity for expression, security and emotional support, and nurturing.
  • Failure to achieve psychological intimacy may result in feelings of emotional isolation and loneliness.
• Integrated involvement is closeness achieved through tasks and activities.
  • It results in enjoyment of work, social identity and self-definition, being valued for one's skills and abilities, opportunities for power and influence, conditional positive regard, and support for one's beliefs and values.
  • Failure to achieve integrated involvement may result in social isolation.
• Psychological intimacy is based more in emotion, integrated involvement is based in behavior and activity.
• Integrated involvement contributes to social psychological health and well-being.

9-3 Group Behavior

• Group behavior has been a subject of interest in social psychology for a long time, and many different aspects of group behavior have been studied over the years.
• Four of those aspects:
  • Norms of behavior
  • Group cohesion
  • Social loafing
  • Loss of individuality

9-3a Norms of Behavior

• The standards that a work group uses to evaluate the behavior of its members are its norms of behavior.
• These norms may be written or unwritten, verbalized or not verbalized, implicit or explicit. As long as individual members of the group understand them, the norms can be effective in influencing behavior.
• They may specify what members of a group should do (such as a specified dress code) or not do (such as executives not behaving arrogantly with employees).
• Norms may exist in any aspect of work group life.
• They may evolve informally or unconsciously, or they may arise in response to specific challenges.
• Morality norms are more important than competence norms when it comes to making decisions about improving the status of one's work group.
• Performance norms are among the most important group norms from the organization's perspective.
• Group norms of cooperative behavior within a team can lead to members working for mutual benefit, which in turn facilitates team performance.
• Verbal expressions of negativity can be detrimental to team performance and a violation of group norms.
• Organizational culture and corporate codes of ethics reflect behavioral norms expected within work groups.
• Norms that create awareness of and help regulate emotions are critical to groups' effectiveness.

9-3b Group Cohesion

• The interpersonal glue that makes the members of a group stick together is group cohesion.
• Group cohesion can enhance job satisfaction for members and improve organizational productivity.
• Highly cohesive groups are able to manage their membership better than work groups low in cohesion.
• Increased job complexity and task autonomy led to increased group cohesiveness, which translated into better performance.
• When there is a fit between the group's values and those of the organization, groups will report more cohesion and exhibit higher levels of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).
• Highly cohesive groups can lead to the maintenance of close relationships among the members.

9-3c Social Loafing

• Social loafing occurs when one group member comes to rely on the efforts of other group members and fails to contribute their time, effort, thoughts, or other resources to a group.
• Some scholars argue that social loafing, also known as free riding, is a rational response to feelings of inequity or situations in which individual efforts are hard to observe.
• Team member personality factors may mitigate the negative effects of social loafing on team performance.
• Team members who possess high levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to compensate for social loafers so that team performance is not reduced.
• One method for countering social loafing is a member self-evaluation system.
• Identifying individual contributions to the group product also counters loafing.

9-3d Loss of Individuality

• Loss of individuality is a social process through which group members lose self-awareness and its accompanying senses of accountability, inhibition, and responsibility for individual behavior.
• People may engage in morally reprehensible acts and even violent behavior as committed members of their group or organization when their individuality is lost.
• The loosening of normal ego control mechanisms in the individual sometimes leads to prosocial behavior and even heroic acts in dangerous situations.

9-4 Group Formation and Development

• A group addresses three issues:
  • Interpersonal issues
  • Task issues
  • Authority issues
• Interpersonal issues include matters of trust, personal comfort, and security.
• Task issues include the mission or purpose of the group, the methods the group employs, and the outcomes expected of the group.
• Authority issues include decisions about who is in charge, how power and influence are managed, and who has the right to tell whom to do what.

9-4a Group Formation

• Formal groups are sometimes called official or assigned groups, and informal groups may be called unofficial or emergent groups.
• Formal groups come together to perform specific tasks.
• Informal groups evolve in the work setting to gratify a variety of member needs not met by formal groups.
• Diversity is an important consideration in the formation of groups, as it can enhance performance and lead to new ways of thinking.
• Team members will defer more often to members with task-related diversity, such as education and tenure, for their expertise and perceived contributions to task performance.
• Men and women in gender-balanced groups had higher job satisfaction than those in homogeneous groups.
• Successful interpersonal relationships are made stronger when group members are emotionally intelligent.

9-4b Stages of Group Development

• Immature groups often experience personality clashes and other fault lines at various stages of development.
• Bruce Tuckman's five-stage model of group development proposes that team behavior progresses through five stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.
  • Dependence on guidance and direction is the defining characteristic of the forming stage.
  • Team members compete for position in the storming stage.
  • Agreement and consensus are characteristic of team members in the norming stage.
  • As a team moves into the performing stage, it becomes more strategically aware of its mission and purpose.
  • The final stage of group development is the adjourning stage.

9-4c Characteristics of a Mature Group or Team

• A mature group or team has four characteristics:
  • A clear purpose and mission
  • Well-understood norms and standards of conduct
  • A high level of group cohesion
  • A flexible status structure
• The group's purpose and mission may be assigned or emerge from within the group.
• Behavioral norms, which evolve over time, are well-understood standards of behavior within a group.
• Group cohesion enables a group to exercise effective control over its members in relation to its behavioral norms and standards.
• Status structure is the set of authority and task relations among a group's members.

9-5 Task and Maintenance Functions

• An effective group or team carries out various task functions to perform its work successfully and various maintenance functions to ensure member satisfaction and a sense of team spirit.
• Task functions are those activities directly related to the effective completion of the team's work.
• Maintenance functions are those activities essential to the effective, satisfying interpersonal relationships within a group or team.

9-6 Factors that Influence Group Effectiveness

• Work team effectiveness in the new team environment requires management's attention to both work team structure and work team process.
• In addition to how the team is structured and what the team does, diversity and creativity are emerging as two areas with significant impact on team performance.

9-6a Work Team Structure

• Work team structure issues include goals and objectives, operating guidelines, performance measures, and role specification.

9-6b Work Team Process

• Two of the important process issues in work teams are the managing of cooperative behaviors and the managing of competitive behaviors.
• Cooperative teamwork skills include open communication, trust, personal integrity, positive interdependence, and mutual support.
• Positive competitive teamwork skills include the ability to enjoy competition, play fair, and be a good winner or loser; to have access to information for monitoring where the team and members are in the competition; and not to overgeneralize or exaggerate the results of any specific competition.
• The effects of member experience, expertise, and reward power are important considerations in a work team's process and decision-making.

9-6c Diversity

• Diversity also plays a large role in how effective work groups and teams are.
• Members may contribute to the collective effort through one of four basic styles: the contributor, the collaborator, the communicator, or the challenger.
• An effective group must have an integrator, especially when the group is a cross-functional one, where different perspectives carry the seeds of conflict.
• Since creativity concerns new ideas, some amount of dissimilarity is necessary within a team so that creativity, novelty, and innovation can blossom.
• Recent relational demography research finds that demographic dissimilarity influences employees' absenteeism, commitment, turnover intentions, beliefs, work group relationships, self-esteem, and OCB.
• Structural diversity concerns the number of structural holes, or disconnections between members, within a work team.

9-6d Creativity

• Creativity is often thought of in an individual context rather than a team context.
• Team creativity and divergent thinking can be enhanced through greater diversity in teams, electronic brainstorming, training facilitators, membership change in teams, and building a playground.
• Human capital diversity in teams can be a source of team social capital, which has the potential to enhance the level of team creativity through increased access to a variety of individuals with varying knowledge and experiences.

9-7 Empowerment and Teams

• Successful teams are empowered by their organizational culture.
• As an organizational culture attribute, empowerment encourages participation, an essential ingredient for teamwork.
• Empowerment and team processes both play an important role in team effectiveness and outcomes.

9-7a Empowerment Skills

• Empowerment skills needed by individuals working in groups and teams within organizations fall into four categories:
  • Competence skills
  • Process skills
  • Cooperative and helping behaviors
  • Communication skills
• Competence skills are the first set of skills required for empowerment.
• Empowerment also requires certain process skills.
• A third set of empowerment skills involves the development of cooperative and helping behaviors.
• Communication skills are a final set of essential empowerment skills.

9-7b Self-Managed Teams

• Self-managed teams are teams that make decisions that were once reserved for managers.
• Self-managed teams are one way to implement empowerment in organizations.
• There is strong support for the use of soft influence tactics in managers' communication with self-directed teams, which yields more positive results.

9-7c Remote Teams

• Remote teams are comprised of team members with shared responsibilities and common objectives yet perform from a flexible mix of stationary, mobile, and/or remote work environments.
• Remote teams often use digital platforms, such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, as modes of communication and collaboration.
• Remote team members may require a variety of technical and technological skills for operating in a digital environment.

9-8 Upper Echelon: The Top Management Team (TMT)

• The upper echelon is the top management team (TMT) of the organization.
• Upper echelon theory argues that the background characteristics of the top management team can predict organizational characteristics and set standards for values, competence, ethics, and unique characteristics throughout the organization.
• The central premise of upper echelon theory is that executives' experiences, values, and personalities greatly influence their interpretations of the situations they face and, in turn, affect their choices.
• The ability to exert power and influence throughout the entire organization makes the top management team (TMT) a key to the organization's success.

9-8a Diversity at the Top

• From an organizational health standpoint, diversity and depth in the top management team enhance the CEO's well-being.
• From a performance standpoint, the CEO's top management team can influence the timing of the performance peak, the degree of dysfunction during the closing season of the CEO's tenure, and the rate of decline in organizational performance.
• The presence of a so-called wild turkey in the top management team can be a particularly positive force.
• The wild turkey is a devil's advocate who challenges the thinking of the CEO and other top executives and provides a counterpoint during debates.
• Top management should strive for a balance of dissimilarity and similarity within work teams.

9-8b Multicultural Top Teams

• Homogeneous groups, in which all members share similar backgrounds, are giving way to token groups, in which all but one member come from the same background; bicultural groups, in which two or more members represent each of two distinct cultures; and multicultural groups, in which members represent three or more ethnic backgrounds.
• Diversity within a group may increase the uncertainty, complexity, and inherent confusion in group processes, making it more difficult for the group to achieve its full productivity.
• Most organizations report benefits from increased diversity.