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Chapter 10
Understanding Work Teams
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, students should be able to:
10-1. Analyze the continued popularity of teams in organizations.
10-2. Contrast groups and teams.
10-3. Contrast the five types of teams.
10-4. Identify the characteristics of effective teams.
10-5. Explain how organizations can create team players.
10-6. Decide when to use individuals instead of teams.
INSTRUCTOR’S RESOURCES
Instructors may wish to use the following resources when presenting this chapter.
Text Exercises
An Ethical Choice: The Size of Your Meeting’s Carbon Footprint
Myth or Science?: “Team Members Who Are ‘Hot’ Should Make the Play”
Career OBjectives: Is It Wrong That I’d Rather Have Guys On My Team?
Personal Inventory Assessments: Team Development Behaviors
Point/Counterpoint: To Get the Most Out of Teams, Empower Them
Questions for Review
Experiential Exercise: Composing the “Perfect” Team
Ethical Dilemma: The Sum of the Team Is Less Than Its Members
Text Cases
Case Incident 1: Tongue- Tied in Teams
Case Incident 2: Smart Teams and Dumb Teams
Instructor’s Choice
This section presents an exercise that is NOT found in the student's textbook. Instructor's Choice
reinforces the text's emphasis through various activities. Some Instructor's Choice activities are
centered on debates, group exercises, Internet research, and student experiences. Some can be
used in class in their entirety, while others require some additional work on the student's part.
The course instructor may choose to use these at any time throughout the class—some may be
more effective as icebreakers, while some may be used to pull together various concepts covered
in the chapter.
Web Exercises
At the end of each chapter of this Instructor’s Manual, you will find suggested exercises and
ideas for researching OB topics on the Internet. The exercises “Exploring OB Topics on the
Web” are set up so that you can simply photocopy the pages, distribute them to your class, and
make assignments accordingly. You may want to assign the exercises as an out-of-class activity
or as lab activities with your class.
Summary and Implications for Managers
Few trends have influenced jobs as much as the massive movement to introduce teams
into the workplace. Working on teams requires employees to cooperate with others, share
information, confront differences, and sublimate personal interests for the greater good of
the team. Understanding the distinctions between problem solving, self-managed,
cross-functional, and virtual teams as well as multiteam systems helps determine the
appropriate applications for team-based work. Concepts such as reflexivity, team efficacy,
team identity, team cohesion, and mental models bring to light important issues relating
to team context, composition, and processes. For teams to function optimally, careful
attention must be given to hiring, creating, and rewarding team players.
Still, effective organizations recognize that teams are not always the best method for
getting the work done efficiently. Careful discernment and an understanding of
organizational behavior are needed. Specific implications for mangers follow:
Effective teams have adequate resources, effective leadership, a climate of trust, and a
performance evaluation and reward system that reflects team contributions. These teams
have individuals with technical expertise, and the right traits and skills.
Effective teams tend to be small. They have members who fill role demands and who
prefer to be part of a group.
Effective teams have members who believe in the team’s capabilities, are committed to a
common plan and purpose, and have an accurate shared mental model of what is to be
accomplished.
Select individuals who have the interpersonal skills to be effective team players, provide
training to develop teamwork skills, and reward individuals for cooperative efforts.
Do not assume that teams are always needed. When tasks will not benefit from
interdependency, individuals may be the better choice.
This chapter begins with a vignette describing recreational team-building. Do teams that play together stay
together, as the opening discussion suggests? There is definitely an upside to shared experiences, as we will find in
this chapter. There may also be something about unique, unexpected challenges that bring teams together, as Tough
Mudder claims. We are, however, cautioned to consider the effects of these “play” exercises, including possible
discrimination against employees who are disabled or physically unfit. We will consider more types of team-building
strategies, and teams in general, in this chapter.
BRIEF CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Why Have Teams Become So Popular?
A. Why are teams popular? In short, because we believe they are effective.
1. Teams can sometimes achieve feats an individual could never accomplish.
2. Teams are more flexible and responsive to changing events than traditional
departments or other forms of permanent groupings.
3. They can quickly assemble, deploy, refocus, and disband.
4. They are an effective means to democratize organizations and increase employee
involvement.
5. And finally, research indicates that our involvement in teams positively shapes the
way we think as individuals, introducing a collaborative mindset about even our
personal decision making.
B. The fact that organizations have embraced teamwork doesn’t necessarily mean teams are
always effective.
1. Team members, as humans, can be swayed by fads and herd mentality that can lead
them astray from the best decisions.
II. Differences Between Groups and Teams
A. Groups and teams are not the same thing. (Exhibit 10-1)
B. In the last chapter, we defined a group as two or more individuals, interacting and
interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular objectives.
C. A work group interacts primarily to share information and make decisions to help each
member perform within his/her area of responsibility.
D. A work team generates positive synergy through coordinated effort. Individual efforts
result in a level of performance that is greater than the sum of those individual inputs.
III. Types of Teams (Exhibit 10-2)
A. Problem-Solving Team
1. In the past, teams were typically composed of 5–12 hourly employees from the same
department who met for a few hours each week to discuss ways of improving quality,
efficiency, and the work environment.
2. These problem solving teams rarely have the authority to unilaterally implement
their suggested actions.
B. Self-Managed Work Teams
1. Problem-solving teams only make recommendations.
2. Some organizations have created teams to not only make recommendations but also
to implement solutions.
3. Self-managed teams are groups of employees (typically 10–15 in number) that
perform highly related or interdependent jobs and take on many of the responsibilities
of their former supervisors.
4. This includes planning and scheduling of work, assigning tasks to members,
collective control over the pace of work, making operating decisions, and taking
action on problems.
5. Fully self-managed work teams even select their own members and have the members
evaluate each other’s performance. As a result supervisory roles become less
important.
6. But research on the effectiveness of self-managed work teams has not been uniformly
positive.
C. Cross-Functional Teams
1. Cross-functional teams are teams made up of employees from about the same
hierarchical level, but from different work areas, who come together to accomplish a
task.
2. Many organizations have used horizontal, boundary-spanning groups for years.
3. Cross-functional teams are challenging to manage.
D. Virtual Teams
1. Virtual teams use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members
in order to achieve a common goal.
2. Despite their ubiquity, virtual teams face special challenges.
a. They may suffer because there is less social rapport and direct interaction among
members.
b. As a result, low levels of virtuality in teams results in higher levels of information
sharing, but high levels of virtuality hinder it.
c. For virtual teams to be effective, management should ensure that:
i. Trust is established among members (one inflammatory remark in a team
member e-mail can severely undermine team trust).
ii. Team progress is monitored closely (so the team doesn’t lose sight of its goals
and no team member “disappears”).
iii. The efforts and products of the team are publicized throughout the
organization (so the team does not become invisible).
E. Multiteam Systems
1. The types of teams we’ve described so far are typically smaller, standalone teams,
though their activities relate to the broader objectives of the organization.
a. As tasks become more complex, teams are often made bigger.
b. However, increases in team size are accompanied by higher coordination
demands, creating a tipping point at which the addition of another member does
more harm than good.
2. To solve this problem, organizations are employing multiteam systems, collections
of two or more interdependent teams that share a superordinate goal. In other words,
multiteam systems are a “team of teams.”
3. Some factors that make smaller, more traditional teams effective do not necessarily
apply to multiteam systems and can even hinder their performance.
IV. Creating Effective Teams
A. Introduction
1. Factors for creating effective teams have been summarized in the model found in
Exhibit 10-3.
2. Two caveats:
a. First, teams differ in form and structure—be careful not to rigidly apply the
model’s predictions to all teams.
b. Second, the model assumes that it is already been determined that teamwork is
preferable over individual work.
B. Context: What Factors Determine Whether Teams Are Successful?
1. Four contextual factors most significant to team performance are the following:
a. Adequate resources
i. All work teams rely on resources outside the group to sustain it.
ii. A scarcity of resources directly reduces the ability of the team to perform its
job effectively.
b. Leadership and structure
i. Teams can’t function if they can’t agree on who is to do what and ensure all
members share the workload.
ii. Leadership is especially important in multiteam systems.
c. Climate of trust
i. Members of effective teams trust each other and exhibit trust in their leaders.
ii. When members trust each other they are more willing to take risks.
iii. When members trust their leadership, they are more willing to commit to their
leader’s goals and decisions.
d. Performance evaluation and reward systems
i. Individual performance evaluations and individual incentives are not
consistent with the development of high-performance teams.
ii. In addition to evaluating and rewarding employees for their individual
contributions, management should modify the traditional, individually
oriented evaluation and reward system to reflect team performance and focus
on hybrid systems that recognize individual members for their exceptional
contributions and reward the entire group for positive outcomes.
iii. Management should consider group-based appraisals, profit sharing,
gainsharing, small-group incentives, and other system modifications that will
reinforce team effort and commitment.
C. Team Composition
1. Abilities of members
a. Part of a team’s performance depends on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of its
individual members.
2. Research reveals some insights into team composition and performance.
a. First, when the task entails considerable thought (solving a complex problem such
as reengineering an assembly line), high-ability teams (composed of mostly
intelligent members) do better than lower-ability teams, especially when the
workload is distributed evenly.
b. The ability of the team’s leader also matters.
3. Personality of members
a. Some of the dimensions identified in the Big Five personality model have shown
to be relevant to team effectiveness.
b. Research has also provided us with a good idea about why these personality traits
are important to teams.
i. Conscientious people are good at backing up other team members, and they’re
also good at sensing when their support is truly needed.
ii. One study found that specific behavioral tendencies such as personal
organization, cognitive structuring, achievement orientation, and endurance
were all related to higher levels of team performance.
iii. Open team members communicate better with one another and throw out
more ideas, which makes teams composed of open people more creative and
innovative.
4. Allocation of roles
a. Teams have different needs, and people should be selected for a team to ensure
that there is diversity and that all various roles are filled.
b. Nine roles of potential teams members are found in Exhibit 10-4.
c. Managers need to understand the individual strengths that each person can bring
to a team, select members with their strengths in mind, and allocate work
assignments accordingly.
i. Put your most able, experienced, and conscientious workers in the most
central roles in a team.
5. Diversity of members
a. How does team diversity affect team performance?
i. The degree to which members of a work unit (group, team, or department)
share a common demographic attribute, such as age, sex, race, educational
level, or length of service in the organization, is the subject of organizational
demography.
ii. Organizational demography suggests that attributes such as age or the date
of joining should help us predict turnover.
(a) The logic goes like this: turnover will be greater among those with
dissimilar experiences because communication is more difficult and
conflict is more likely.
(b) Increased conflict makes membership less attractive, so employees are
more likely to quit.
(c) Similarly, the losers in a power struggle are more apt to leave voluntarily
or be forced out.
b. Many of us hold the optimistic view that diversity should be a good thing—
diverse teams should benefit from differing perspectives and do better.
i. Two meta-analytic reviews of the research literature show, however, that
demographic diversity is essentially unrelated to team performance overall.
ii. One qualifier is that gender and ethnic diversity have more negative effects in
occupations dominated by white or male employees, but in more
demographically balanced occupations, diversity is less of a problem.
iii. Diversity in function and expertise are positively related to group
performance, but these effects are quite small and depend on the situation.
c. Proper leadership can also improve the performance of diverse teams.
i. When leaders provide an inspirational common goal for members with
varying types of education and knowledge, teams are very creative.
ii. When leaders don’t provide such goals, diverse teams fail to take advantage of
their unique skills and are actually less creative than teams with homogeneous
skills.
6. Cultural Differences
a. We have discussed research on team diversity in race or gender. But what about
diversity created by national differences?
i. Like the earlier research, evidence here indicates these elements of diversity
interfere with team processes, at least in the short term.
(a) Cultural diversity does seem to be an asset for tasks that call for a variety
of viewpoints.
(b) But culturally heterogeneous teams have more difficulty learning to work
with each other and solving problems.
(c) The good news is that these difficulties seem to dissipate with time.
(i) Although newly formed culturally diverse teams underperform newly
formed culturally homogeneous teams, the differences disappear after
about 3 months.
7. Size of teams
a. Most experts agree, keeping teams small is a key to improving group
effectiveness.
i. Generally speaking, the most effective teams have five to nine members.
ii. Experts suggest using the smallest number of people who can do the task.
iii. Managers often err by making teams too large.
(a) It may require only four or five members to develop diversity of views and
skills, while coordination problems can increase exponentially as team
members are added.
(b) When teams have excess members, cohesiveness and mutual
accountability decline, social loafing increases, and more people
communicate less.
(c) Members of large teams have trouble coordinating with one another,
especially under time pressure.
b. If a natural working unit is larger and you want a team effort, consider breaking
the group into subteams.
8. Member preferences
a. Not every employee is a team player.
b. Given the option, many employees will select themselves out of team
participation.
c. High performing teams are likely to be composed of people who prefer working
as part of a group.
D. Team Processes
1. Introduction
a. The final category related to team effectiveness is process variables such as
member commitment to a common purpose, establishment of specific team goals,
team efficacy, a managed level of conflict, and minimized social loafing.
b. These will be especially important in larger teams, and in teams that are highly
interdependent.
c. Why are processes important to team effectiveness?
i. When each member’s contribution is not clearly visible, individuals tend to
decrease their effort.
ii. Social loafing, in other words, illustrates a process loss from using teams.
d. Exhibit 10-5 illustrates how group processes can have an impact on a group’s
actual effectiveness.
e. Teams are often used in research laboratories because they can draw on the
diverse skills of various individuals to produce more meaningful research than
could be generated by all the researchers working independently—that is, they
produce positive synergy, and their process gains exceed their process losses.
2. Common plan and purpose
a. Effective teams begin by analyzing the team’s mission, developing goals to
achieve that mission, and creating strategies for achieving the goals.
b. Teams that establish a clear sense of what needs to be done and how consistently
perform better.
c. Members of successful teams put a tremendous amount of time and effort into
discussing, shaping, and agreeing on a purpose that belongs to them both
collectively and individually.
d. Effective teams also show reflexivity, meaning they reflect on and adjust their
master plan when necessary.
3. Specific goals
a. Successful teams translate their common purpose into specific, measurable, and
realistic performance goals. They energize the team.
b. Specific goals facilitate clear communication and help teams maintain their focus
on results. Team goals should be challenging.
4. Team efficacy
a. Effective teams have confidence in themselves and believe they can succeed—
this is team efficacy.
b. Teams that have a shared knowledge of who knows what within the team can
strengthen the link between the team’s self-efficacy and their individual creativity
because members can more effectively solicit opinions and advice from their
teammates.
i. What can management do to increase team efficacy?
(a) Two options are helping the team achieve small successes that build
confidence and providing training to improve members’ technical and
interpersonal skills.
(i) The greater the abilities of team members, the more likely the team
will develop confidence and the ability to deliver on that confidence.
5. Team Identity
a. When people connect emotionally with the groups they’re in, they are more likely
to invest in their relationship with those groups. It’s the same with teams.
i. For example, research with soldiers in the Netherlands indicated that
individuals who felt included and respected by team members became more
willing to work hard for their teams, even though as soldiers they were already
called upon to be dedicated to their units.
ii. Therefore, 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.
b. Organizational identity is important, too.
c. Rarely do teams operate in a vacuum— more often teams interact with other
teams, requiring interteam coordination.
d. Individuals with a positive team identity but without a positive organizational
identity can become fixed to their teams and unwilling to coordinate with other
teams within the organization.
6. Team Cohesion
a. The term team cohesion means members are emotionally attached to one another
and motivated toward the team because of their attachment.
b. Team cohesion is a useful tool to predict team outcomes.
i. For example, a large study in China recently indicated that if team cohesion is
high and tasks are complex, costly investments in promotions, rewards,
training, and so forth yield greater profitable team creativity.
c. Teams with low cohesion and simple tasks, on the other hand, are not likely to
respond to incentives with greater creativity.
d. Team cohesion is a strong predictor of team performance such that when cohesion
is harmed, performance may be too.
e. To mitigate this effect, teams can foster high levels of interdependence and
high-quality interpersonal interactions.
7. Mental models
a. Effective teams share accurate mental models—organized mental representations
of the key elements within a team’s environment that team members share.
b. If team members have the wrong mental models, which are particularly likely
with teams under acute stress, their performance suffers.
c. If team members have different ideas about how to do things, the team will fight
over how to do things rather than focus on what needs to be done.
8. Conflict levels
a. Conflict on a team isn’t necessarily bad.
b. Conflict has a complex relationship with team performance.
c. Relationship conflicts—those based on interpersonal incompatibilities, tension,
and animosity toward others—are almost always dysfunctional.
d. When teams are performing nonroutine activities, disagreements about task
content (called task conflicts) stimulate discussion, promote critical assessment of
problems and options, and can lead to better team decisions.
e. A study conducted in China found that moderate levels of task conflict during the
initial phases of team performance were positively related to team creativity, but
both very low and very high levels of task conflict were negatively related to team
performance.
f. The way conflicts are resolved can also make the difference between effective and
ineffective teams.
9. Social loafing
a. Individuals can hide inside a group.
b. Effective teams undermine this tendency by making members individually and
jointly accountable for the team’s purpose, goals, and approach.
c. Members should be clear on what they are individually responsible for and what
they are jointly responsible for on the team.
V. Turning Individuals into Team Players
A. Introduction
1. Many people are not inherently team players. They are loners or want to be
recognized for their own accomplishments.
2. There are also a great many organizations that have historically nurtured individual
accomplishments. How do we introduce teams in highly individualistic
environments?
B. Selecting: Hiring Team Players
1. Some people already possess the interpersonal skills to be effective team players.
2. Care should be taken to ensure that candidates could fulfill their team roles as well as
technical requirements.
C. Training: Creating Team Players
1. Training specialists conduct exercises that allow employees to experience the
satisfaction teamwork can provide.
