1. L’Oréal found that successful sales teams required much more than being staffed with
high-ability salespeople: management had to focus much of its efforts on team
building.
2. Developing an effective team doesn’t happen overnight—it takes time.
B. Rewarding: Providing Incentives to Be a Good Team Player
1. An organization’s reward system must be reworked to encourage cooperative efforts
rather than competitive ones.
2. Hallmark Cards, Inc., added to its basic individual-incentive system an annual bonus
based on achievement of team goals.
3. Apparently, the low trust typical of the competitive group will not be readily replaced
by high trust with a quick change in reward systems.
4. Promotions, pay raises, and other forms of recognition should be given to individuals
who work effectively as team members by training new colleagues, sharing
information, helping resolve team conflicts, and mastering needed new skills.
5. This doesn’t mean individual contributions should be ignored; rather, they should be
balanced with selfless contributions to the team.
6. Finally, don’t forget the intrinsic rewards, such as camaraderie, that employees can
receive from teamwork. It’s exciting and satisfying to be part of a successful team.
7. The opportunity for personal development of self and teammates can be a very
satisfying and rewarding experience.
II. Beware! Teams Are Not Always the Answer
A. Teamwork takes more time and often more resources than individual work.
B. Teams have increased communication demands, conflicts to manage, and meetings to
run.
C. The benefits of using teams have to exceed the costs, and that’s not always the case.
D. Before you rush to implement teams, carefully assess whether the work requires or will
benefit from a collective effort.
E. How do you know whether the work of your group would be better done in teams?
1. You can apply three tests to see whether a team fits your situation.
a. First, can the work be done better by more than one person?
b. Second, 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?
c. The final test is to determine whether the members of the group are
interdependent.
III. Summary and Implications for Managers
A. Few trends have influenced jobs as much as the massive movement to introduce teams
into the workplace.
B. Working on teams requires employees to cooperate with others, share information,
confront differences, and sublimate personal interests for the greater good of the team.
C. 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.
D. 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.
E. For teams to function optimally, careful attention must be given to hiring, creating, and
rewarding team players.
F. Still, effective organizations recognize that teams are not always the best method for
getting the work done efficiently.
G. Careful discernment and an understanding of organizational behavior are needed.
Specific implications for mangers are:
1. 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.
2. Effective teams tend to be small. They have members who fill role demands and who
prefer to be part of a group.
3. 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.
4. Select individuals who have the interpersonal skills to be effective team players,
provide training to develop teamwork skills, and reward individuals for cooperative
efforts.
5. Do not assume that teams are always needed. When tasks will not benefit from
interdependency, individuals may be the better choice.
EXPANDED CHAPTER OUTLINE
I Why Have Teams Become So Popular?
H. 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.
I. 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.
IV. 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.
1. A work group is a group that interacts primarily to share information and to make
decisions to help each member perform within his or her area of responsibility.
a. Work groups have no need or opportunity to engage in collective work that
requires joint effort. Their performance is the summation of each group member’s
individual contribution.
b. There is no positive synergy that would create an overall level of performance
greater than the sum of the inputs.
C. A work team generates positive synergy through coordinated effort.
1. Individual efforts result in a level of performance that is greater than the sum of those
individual inputs.
a. Management is looking for that positive synergy that will allow their
organizations to increase performance.
b. The extensive use of teams creates the potential for an organization to generate
greater outputs with no increase in inputs.
c. Merely calling a group a team doesn’t automatically increase its performance.
V. 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 work teams are groups of employees (typically 10–15 in number)
who 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.
a. Self-managed teams do not typically manage conflicts well.
b. When disputes arise, members stop cooperating and power struggles ensue, which
leads to lower group performance.
c. Moreover, although individuals on these teams report higher levels of job
satisfaction than other individuals, they also sometimes have higher absenteeism
and turnover rates.
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.
a. IBM created a large task force in the 1960s—made up of employees from across
departments in the company—to develop the highly successful System 360.
3. Cross-functional teams are an effective means of allowing people from diverse areas
within or even between organizations to exchange information, develop new ideas,
solve problems, and coordinate complex projects.
4. Cross-functional teams are challenging to manage.
D. Virtual Teams
1. The previous types of teams do their work face-to-face.
2. Virtual teams use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members
in order to achieve a common goal.
3. They allow people to collaborate online.
4. 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.”
VI. 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.
3. Three key components:
a. Contextual influences
b. Team’s composition
c. Process variables
B. Context: What Factors Determine Whether Teams Are Successful?
1. Four contextual factors most significant to team performance are:
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.
iii. As one set of researchers concluded, “perhaps one of the most important
characteristics of an effective work group is the support the group receives
from the organization.”
iv. This support includes timely information, proper equipment, adequate
staffing, encouragement, and administrative assistance.
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.
(a) Agreeing on the specifics of work and how they fit together to integrate
individual skills requires leadership and structure, either from
management or from the team members themselves.
(b) It’s true in self-managed teams that team members absorb many of the
duties typically assumed by managers. However, a manager’s job then
becomes managing outside (rather than inside) the team.
ii. Leadership is especially important in multiteam systems.
(a) Here, leaders need to empower teams by delegating responsibility to them,
and they play the role of facilitator, making sure the teams work together
rather than against one another.
(b) Teams that establish shared leadership by effectively delegating it are
more effective than teams with a traditional single-leader structure.
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.
i. That way, team performance does not depend on the weakest link.
ii. High-ability teams are also more adaptable to changing situations; they can
more effectively apply existing knowledge to new problems.
b. The ability of the team’s leader also matters.
i. Smart team leaders help less-intelligent team members when they struggle
with a task.
ii. But a less-intelligent leader can neutralize the effect of a high-ability team.
3. Personality of members
a. Some of the dimensions identified in the Big Five personality model have shown
to be relevant to team effectiveness.
i. Teams that rate higher on mean levels of conscientiousness and openness to
experience tend to perform better, and the minimum level of team member
agreeableness also matters:
(a) Teams did worse when they had one or more highly disagreeable
members.
(b) Perhaps one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch!
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.
iv. Suppose an organization needs to create 20 teams of 4 people each and has 40
highly conscientious people and 40 who score low on conscientiousness.
(a) Would the organization be better off:
(i) forming 10 teams of highly conscientious people and 10 teams of
members low on conscientiousness?
(ii) “seeding” each team with 2 people who scored high and 2 who scored
low on conscientiousness?
(iii)Perhaps surprisingly, evidence suggests option (i) is the best choice;
performance across the teams will be higher if the organization forms
10 highly conscientious teams and 10 teams low in conscientiousness.
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 the 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.
c. Team goals should be challenging.
E. Team Efficacy
1. Effective teams have confidence in themselves and believe they can succeed—this is
team efficacy. Success breeds success.
2. Teams that have a shared knowledge of who knows what within the team can
strengthen the link between team members’ self-efficacy and their individual
creativity, because members can more effectively solicit opinions and advice from
their teammates.
3. 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.
b. The greater the abilities of team members, the more likely the team will develop
confidence and the ability to deliver on that confidence.
F. Team Identity
1. 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.
a. 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.
b. 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.
2. Organizational identity is important, too.
3. Rarely do teams operate in a vacuum—more often teams interact with other teams,
requiring interteam coordination.
4. 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.
G. Team Cohesion
1. The term team cohesion means members are emotionally attached to one another and
motivated toward the team because of their attachment.
2. Team cohesion is a useful tool to predict team outcomes.
a. 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.
3. Teams with low cohesion and simple tasks, on the other hand, are not likely to
respond to incentives with greater creativity.
4. Team cohesion is a strong predictor of team performance such that when cohesion is
harmed, performance may be too.
5. To mitigate this effect, teams can foster high levels of interdependence and
high-quality interpersonal interactions.
H. Mental Models
1. Effective teams share accurate mental models—organized mental representations of
the key elements within a team’s environment that team members share.
2. If team members have the wrong mental models, which are particularly likely with
teams under acute stress, their performance suffers.