Understanding Work Teams

10-1 Contrast groups and teams.

Groups and teams are often used interchangeably but have distinct characteristics.
A work group is defined as two or more individuals interacting and interdependent, coming together to achieve particular objectives.
- Work groups primarily share information and make decisions to help each member perform within their respective area of responsibility.
- There is no need for collective work with joint effort in work groups.
- Group performance is the summation of each member’s individual contribution.
- Work groups do not generate positive synergy.
A work team generates positive synergy through coordination.
- Individual efforts result in a level of performance greater than the sum of the individual inputs.
- Teams are dynamic systems that are constantly changing and adapting.
Both work groups and work teams have:
- Behavioral expectations of members.
- Collective normalization efforts.
- Active group dynamics.
- Some level of decision making.
- Idea generation, resource pooling, and logistical coordination.
A work team is a subset of a work group, constructed to be purposeful in its member interaction.
Exhibit 10-1 compares work groups and work teams:
- Work Groups
  - Goal: Share information
  - Synergy: Neutral (sometimes negative)
  - Accountability: Individual
  - Skills: Random and varied
- Work Teams
  - Goal: Collective performance
  - Synergy: Positive
  - Accountability: Individual and mutual
  - Skills: Complementary
Organizations structure work processes to generate greater outputs with no increase in employee head count.
Effective teams have certain common characteristics.

10-2 Contrast the five types of team arrangements.

Teams can make products, provide services, negotiate deals, coordinate projects, offer advice, and make decisions.
Four common types of teams in organizations:
- Problem-solving teams
- Self-managed work teams
- Cross-functional teams
- Virtual teams
Multiteam systems take a broader perspective and suggest a “team of teams” interacts within and across organizations.

Problem-Solving Teams

Problem-solving teams are permanent teams that generally meet regularly to address quality standards and problems with products made.
These teams rarely have the authority to implement their suggestions unilaterally.
Significant improvements can be realized if recommendations are paired with implementation processes.

Self-Managed Work Teams

Self-managed work teams implement solutions and take responsibility for outcomes.
They are composed of employees who perform highly related or interdependent jobs and take on some supervisory responsibilities.
Responsibilities include: planning and scheduling work, assigning tasks to members, making operating decisions, taking action to solve problems, and working with suppliers and customers.
Fully self-managed work teams select their own members and evaluate each other’s performance.
Former supervisory positions take on decreased importance and are sometimes eliminated.
Without authority and accountability, teams may spend valuable time aligning team member values and goals.
Research findings on the effectiveness of self-managed work teams have not been uniformly positive.
- Effectiveness of self-managed teams is contingent on the degree to which team-promoting behaviors are rewarded.
- Self-managed teams are not effective when there is conflict, unless members feel psychologically safe.
- Individuals on teams report higher levels of job satisfaction but sometimes have higher absenteeism and turnover rates.
- Leaders may “over-emerge” in the absence of controlled supervision.

Cross-Functional Teams

Cross-functional teams are made up of employees from about the same hierarchical level but from different work areas who come together to accomplish a task.
They exchange information, develop new ideas, solve problems, and coordinate complex projects.
High need for coordination makes them not simple to form and manage.
- Different expertise creates leadership ambiguity.
- Early stages of development are often long because members need to learn to work with higher levels of diversity and complexity.
- It takes time to build trust and teamwork, especially among people with different experiences and perspectives.
- Organizations with flat structures may derive the least benefit.
A portfolio governance team (PGT) is a type of cross-functional team in which team leaders from different functions work together.
Cross-functional teams can be made more successful by:
1. Establishing an accountable leader.
2. Ensuring that each team has established goals, resources, and deadlines.
3. Establishing a clear mission for the team.
4. Continuously reevaluating the team and its progress.
5. Reconsidering the usefulness of the team if it is unsuccessful.

Virtual Teams

Virtual teams use technology to unite physically dispersed members to achieve a common goal.
Members collaborate online using networks, corporate social media, videoconferencing, e-mail, and messenger applications.
Virtual environments differ from in-person environments in the ways they convey social cues and foster a sense of distance.
Virtual teams may share more unique information with one another than in-person teams, but may be less open to sharing information with one another.
Trust is very important for virtual teams to be effective.
Management should ensure that:
1. Trust is established among members.
2. Progress is monitored closely.
3. The efforts and products of the team are publicized throughout the organization.
Managers should carefully select who will be a member of a virtual team because working on a virtual team may require different competencies.

Multiteam Systems

Multiteam systems are composed of collections of two or more interdependent teams that share a superordinate goal; a “team of teams.”
Some factors that make smaller, more traditional teams effective do not necessarily apply to multiteam systems.
- Multiteam systems performed better when they had “boundary spanners” whose jobs were to coordinate with all constituents.
- Some members may emerge as “boundary spoilers,” who can hinder effective coordination.
- Some teams may have different perspectives that actually hinder effective communication and coordination.
Strong identification to one’s own team can lead to conflicts between teams, while identification with the multiteam system as a whole can reduce conflicts.
Identification with the multiteam system as a whole can also lead to uncertainty regarding which norms to follow and role expectations across teams.
Multiteam systems may also enjoy higher performance when planning is decentralized, but they may also have more problems with coordination.
Leadership of multiteam systems is much different than for stand-alone teams.
- A multiteam leader must both facilitate coordination between teams and lead them.
- Teams that receive more attention and engagement from the organization’s leaders may feel more empowered.

An Ethical Choice: The Size of Your Meeting’s Carbon Footprint

Virtual teams may be in line with corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives by keeping team members where they are as opposed to having them travel.
When teams are able to meet virtually rather than in person, they dramatically reduce their carbon footprint.
Tips for minimizing your organization’s environmental impact from business travel:
1. Encourage all team members to think about whether an in-person meeting is really necessary and utilize alternative communication methods whenever possible.
2. Communicate as much as possible through virtual means (e.g., e-mail, telephone calls, and videoconferencing).
3. When traveling to team meetings, choose the most environmentally responsible travel methods possible and check the environmental profile of hotels before booking rooms.
4. Consider the financial savings, as communicating electronically can result in two benefits: (1) It is cheaper, and (2) it is good for the environment.

10-3 Identify the characteristics of effective teams.

Teams are often created deliberately but sometimes evolve organically.
Factors related to team effectiveness can be organized into a focused model:
- Exhibit 10-3 summarizes what we currently know about what makes teams effective.
- The key components of effective teams can be organized into three general categories:
  - Contextual influences
  - Team’s composition
  - Process and state variables
Team effectiveness typically includes objective measures of the team’s productivity, managers’ ratings of the team’s performance, and aggregate measures of member satisfaction.

Team Context

Five of the contextual factors that most significantly relate to team performance:
- Adequate resources
- Leadership and structure
- Culture and climate
- A performance evaluation and reward system that reflects team contributions
- Crises and extreme contexts

Adequate Resources

Every work team relies on resources outside the group to sustain it.
A scarcity of resources directly reduces the ability of a team to perform its job effectively and achieve its goals.
Support from the organization includes timely information, proper equipment, adequate staffing, encouragement, and administrative assistance.

Leadership and Structure

Teams cannot function if they disagree on who is to do what and do not ensure that all members share the workload.
Leaders play critical motivational roles for team members and should be transformational and empowering.
The relationship between the leader and their team member followers is important for job attitudes, job performance, and turnover intentions.

Culture and Climate

Teams can have their own cultures and climates that influence their effectiveness.
Team climates that promote collaboration can lead teams to become more motivated and creative.
A shared sense of vision, a sense of being able to share and collaborate in a nonthreatening environment, a concern for performance quality, encouragement of creative and innovative solutions, and practicing regular, frequent interaction are the most important factors for team climate.
Perceptions of fair and just policies, practices, and procedures have proved very important for team attitudes, conflict, and performance.

Performance Evaluation and Reward System

Individual performance evaluations and incentives may interfere with the development of high-performance teams.
Management should utilize hybrid performance systems that incorporate individual rewards to recognize individual contributions and group rewards to recognize positive team outcomes.
Group-based appraisals, profit sharing, small-group incentives, and other system modifications can reinforce team effort and commitment.
Constructive feedback can have a positive effect on team performance.
Take care to avoid bias and discrimination in implementing a team reward system.

Crises and Extreme Contexts

Crises and extreme contexts can unlock the potential of team members who do truly great things under stress, but they can also lead to disaster.
People tend to default to gathering information rather than taking action, and when they do take action, they do so without deliberately considering the context or options or even forming a plan.
Leaders are most effective during disasters when they support team problem solving, are supportive of the team members, initiate structure and planning, delegate, and coordinate as well as help team members make sense of the situation.
Team scaffolds (i.e., fluid, underlying structures that establish role types, shared responsibilities, and boundaries in teams) help support coordination during crises.
Higher-performing teams tend to be adaptable and exhibit few, short, and simple interaction patterns.
Positive affectivity (PA) can help buffer the negative impact of the strain of the crisis situation.
Informed decision making is critical, as team members should know where to target decision making, how to share information effectively, and when to reflect on team objectives, processes, and strategies before acting.

Team Composition

The team composition category includes variables that relate to how teams should be staffed:
- The abilities and personalities of team members
- Allocation of roles
- Diversity and cultural differences
- Size of the team
- Members’ preferences for teamwork

Abilities of Members

A team’s performance depends in part on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of individual members.
Abilities set limits on what members can do and how effectively they will perform on a team.
Conflict resolution, collaborative problem solving, communication, goal setting, and planning abilities/skills are helpful to be an effective team member.
Complementary backgrounds tend to be more strongly related to innovation and creativity in practice.
Over time, the experiences of team members add up to improve performance by enhancing the way problems are solved as members learn to work together.

Personality of Members

Personality traits significantly influence behavior.
Conscientiousness is especially important to teams.
Teams that are more agreeable tend to perform better.
Open team members are willing to share more ideas with one another, which makes teams composed of open people more creative and innovative.
Teams confronted with task conflict will likely perform better when they are composed of members with high levels of emotional stability.
A high mean level of extroversion in a team can increase the level of helping behaviors, particularly in a team climate of cooperation.
Team proactive personality is important for team innovation.

Allocation of Roles

Teams have different needs, and members should be selected to ensure that all the various roles are filled.
Teams with more experienced and skilled members performed better.
Experience and skill of those in core roles who handled more of the workflow of the team were especially vital.
Exhibit 10-4 identifies thirteen potential team roles.
- Successful work teams have selected people to play most of these roles based on their skills and preferences and to avoid the four roles that are generally negative for team functioning (e.g., dominator, critic, shirker, and detractor).
Managers need to understand the individual strengths each person can bring to a team, select members with their strengths in mind, and allocate work assignments that fit with members’ strengths.

Diversity of Members

Demography is a term used to describe the level of diversity in groups and teams and suggest that attributes such as age or the date of joining should matter for organizations, such as in the prediction of conflict.
Conflict will be greater among those with dissimilar experiences because communication is more difficult.
If the diverse team sticks it out and stays together over time, they can reach desirable performance levels.
Diverse teams are less likely to fall victim to conformity, are more likely to share more information with one another, make fewer errors, and may be more creative than non-diverse teams.

Toward a Better World: Hershey: Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Through Groups and Teams

Business Resource Groups (BRGs) are geared toward advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at Hershey.

Cultural Differences

Exhibit 10-4 identified key roles of teams.
Cultural diversity interferes with team processes, at least in the short term.
Cultural diversity seems to be an asset for tasks that call for a variety of viewpoints.
Culturally heterogeneous teams have more difficulty learning to work with each other and solving problems.
Team benefits of cultural diversity depend upon the team’s cultural composition.
- Cultural differences negatively affected team performance for cultural majority members.
- Cultural differences positively affected team performance for cultural minority members.

Team Size

Keeping teams small is key to improving group effectiveness.
Experts suggest using the smallest number of people who can do the task.
When teams have excess members, cohesiveness and mutual accountability decline, social loafing increases, and people communicate less.
When a natural working unit is larger and you want a team effort, consider breaking the group into subteams.

Member Preferences

Not every employee works well in teams.
When people who prefer to work alone are required to team up, there is a direct threat to the team’s morale and to individual member satisfaction.
Managers should consider individual preferences along with abilities, personalities, and skills when selecting team members.
High-performing teams are likely to be composed of people who prefer working as part of a group.

Team Processes and States

The final category related to team effectiveness includes processes (e.g., procedures, activities, and behaviors) and team states (e.g., collective emotional, attitudinal, or motivational states) such as member commitment to a common plan and purpose, motivation, team efficacy, team identity, team cohesion, mental models, conflict, social loafing, and trust.
Exhibit 10-5 illustrates how group processes can have an impact on a group’s effectiveness:

Potential \text{ Team Effectiveness } + \text{ Process Gains } - \text{ Process Losses } = \text{ Actual Team Effectiveness}

Common Plan and Purpose

Effective teams begin by analyzing the team’s mission, developing goals to achieve that mission, and creating strategies for achieving the goals.
Teams that consistently perform better have a clear sense of what needs to be done and how.
Teams should agree on whether their purpose is to learn about and master a task or simply to perform the task.
Engaging in effective planning processes is also easier when members strongly identify with their team.
Effective teams show reflexivity, meaning they reflect on and adjust their purpose when necessary.
Reflexivity can help improve psychological well-being in manufacturing teams, help startup teams learn from their setbacks, help research and development teams innovate, and can help improve performance in extreme environments.

Myth or Science? Teams Should Practice Collective Mindfulness

Collective mindfulness is a shared practice among team members in which they interact with one another with awareness and attention to the present experiences.
Teams practicing mindfulness also engage in nonjudgmental processing of experiences within the team, such as stress about an upcoming deadline.
The practice of collective mindfulness can lead to several desirable outcomes for teams, including creating a psychologically safe environment, reducing relationship conflict within the team, better innovation performance, and increasing employees’ well-being and job satisfaction.

Mental Models

The members of an effective team share accurate mental models.
Teams with shared mental models engage in more frequent interactions with one another, are more motivated, have more positive attitudes toward their work, and have higher levels of objectively rated performance.
Teams should also develop transactive memory systems, which represent the ways in which team members collect, integrate, generate, and distribute knowledge to develop a shared understanding of their environment.
Transactive memory systems are important for performance, especially in collectivist and high-power-distance cultures, for top management teams of executives, and in environments that are particularly volatile (e.g., times of crisis).

Team Conflict

Relationship conflict—conflict based on interpersonal incompatibility, tension, and animosity toward others—is almost always dysfunctional, especially among friends.
Task conflict—disagreements about task content—stimulate discussion, promote critical assessment of problems and options, and can lead to better team decisions.
Ethical conflict describes the ways in which team members disagree about ethical issues.
Positive and negative effects of conflict on performance may be smaller or larger depending on many factors, such as the task type, the setting, and how performance is measured.
Task conflict is beneficial when members are open to experience and emotionally stable.
Moderate levels of task conflict during the initial phases of team performance are positively related to team creativity, but both very low and very high levels of task conflict are negatively related to team performance.
Effective teams resolved conflicts by explicitly discussing the task disagreements, whereas ineffective teams had unresolved conflicts that were focused more on personalities and the way things were said.

Social Loafing

Effective teams undermine social loafing by making members individually and jointly accountable for the team’s purpose, goals, and approach.
Members should be clear on what they are individually and jointly responsible for on the team.

Team States

Emergent states are collective attitudinal, emotional, or motivational states that guide how team members approach teamwork.

Motivation

Successful teams translate their common purpose into specific, measurable, and difficult (yet realistic) performance goals that align with team objectives.
Goals for quantity tend to increase quantity, goals for accuracy increase accuracy, and so on.
Goals intended to improve team member performance have the tendency to undermine group performance.
Teams that are geared toward achievement tend to perform better over time.
Teams that are strategic in how they allocate their resources and energy tend to perform better.

Team Efficacy

Effective teams have confidence in themselves; they believe they can succeed.
Teams that have been successful raise their beliefs about future success, which in turn motivates them to work harder.
Team efficacy is strongly predictive of team performance, especially when team members are dependent upon one another to contribute to team goals.
Helping the team achieve small successes that build confidence and providing training to improve members’ technical and interpersonal skills can increase team efficacy.

Team Identity

When people connect emotionally with the groups they are in, they are more likely to invest in their relationship with those groups.
When team identity is strong, team members who are highly motivated by performance goals are more likely to direct their efforts toward team goals rather than individual goals.
By recognizing individuals’ specific skills and abilities, as well as creating a climate of respect and inclusion, leaders and members can foster positive team identity and improved team outcomes.
Managers should pay special attention to fostering team identity in virtual teams.

Team Cohesion

Cohesion occurs when team members form a shared bond that drives them to work together and stay together as a team.
Cohesive groups and teams tend to perform better than non-cohesive teams.
Sharing leadership responsibilities, open information sharing among team members, and interdependence among team members can increase team cohesion.

Team Trust

Trust in teams entails a mutual, positive state of positive expectations between team members.
Team trust evolves over time as members share with one another, put effort into the team, and monitor one another’s performance.
Team trust has been shown to have a sizeable effect on team performance, especially in virtual teams.
Leadership plays a key role in facilitating trust and trust repair, and is important in facilitating team performance and creativity.

10-4 Explain how organizations can create effective teams.

Many organizations have historically gone to great lengths to hire, train, and reward team members.

Selecting: Hiring for Team Effectiveness

Managers try to be certain that candidates can fulfill their team roles as well as technical requirements when hiring team members.
Managers should be sure to hire applicants who have the highest potential to perform well in a team and strategically place them in teams where they are most likely to work well with the other team members.
Some managers are engaging in cluster hiring, or the selection of an already-existing team to work in a new role.

Training: Creating Effective Teams

Training specialists conduct exercises that enable teams to perform more effectively by learning relevant team skills and practices.
Teams should be trained to develop shared mental models and transactive memory systems.
Virtual transactive memory systems are incredibly important, especially in this new paradigm of remote work where people do not meet in person as often as they once did.
Team training is not just a one-time activity—the need for team training evolves over time, and managers would do well to keep a pulse on teams’ training needs in their organizations.

Rewarding: Providing Incentives for Exceptional Teams

A traditional organization’s reward system must be reworked to encourage cooperative efforts rather than competitive ones.
Rewarding teams has the benefit of providing a common goal that every team member can work to achieve and gives each member an opportunity to be recognized.
Many companies offer team rewards, and not all of them are financial.
Teams that switch from competitive to cooperative motivations do not immediately share information, and they tend to make rushed, poor-quality decisions.
Team-based rewards have been shown to positively influence team performance, especially when they are distributed based on an individual’s level of contribution (rather than equally distributed).

10-5 Decide when to use individuals instead of teams.

Teamwork takes more time and often more resources than individual work.
The benefits of using teams must exceed the costs.
Many otherwise effective employees may find themselves overwhelmed when there is too much of a focus on teams and teamwork or when team demands become excessive.
Effective teamwork requires work: Team members should have the resources to plan, execute, and adapt to changing environments; leadership transitions need to be handled smoothly, and both motivation and conflict need to be managed properly.
Three tests to determine whether the work of your group would be better done in teams:
1. Can the work be done better by more than one person? Good indicators are the complexity of the work and the need for different perspectives. Simple tasks that do not require diverse input are probably better left to individuals.
2. Does the work create a common purpose or set of goals for the people in the group that is more than the aggregate of individual goals?
3. Are the members of the group interdependent? Using teams makes sense when there is interdependence among tasks—the success of the whole depends on the success of each one, and the success of each one depends on the success of the others.