With increasing global competition, organizations must constantly adapt to keep abreast of
changes. Teams provide the flexibility to react quickly.
Case Study: Teamwork at IDEO
Summary: IDEO is a global award-winning design firm. IDEO’s corporate philosophy is that teamwork
4. Employee Benefits
Employees tend to benefit as much as organizations in a team environment. Teams can
5. Costs of Teams
The costs of teams are usually expressed in terms of the difficulty of changing to a team-
based organization.
Some managers have felt as if they were working themselves out of a job as they turned
over more and more of their directing duties to a team.
B. Promoting Effective Performance
This chapter has described the many benefits of teams and the process of changing to a team-
based organization. In this section we discuss three essential issues that cannot be overlooked
when moving to a team-based organization.
1. Top-Management Support
Change starts at the top in every successful team implementation. Top management has
2. Understanding Time Frames
Organizations often expect too much too soon when they implement teams. In fact, things
often get worse before they get better.
3. Changing Organizational Rewards
How employees are rewarded is vital to the long-term success of an organization. The
traditional reward and compensation systems suitable for individual motivation are simply
not appropriate in a team-based organization.
Three types of reward systems are common in a team environment: skill-based pay, gain-
sharing systems, and team bonus plans.
a. Skill-Based Pay: Skill-based pay systems require team members to acquire a set of
core skills plus additional special skills, depending on career tracks or team needs.
Usually employees can increase their base pay by some fixed amount, say $0.50
C. Teamwork Competencies
Staffing teams with people who have the interpersonal skills and competencies to contribute to
task performance but who are also able to work well in team settings is critical.
Some of the teamwork abilities you should look for are:
a. Conflict resolution abilities
Teamwork competencies also include an understanding of ethical behavior in teams. Other
people’s ethical behavior influences our own ethical behavior.
Four ethical issues are especially important in teams:
a. How do teams fairly distribute work?
V. EMERGING TEAM OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES
As teams become increasingly common in organizations, two additional sets of opportunities and
challenges must be addressed.
These involve virtual teams and diversity and multicultural teams.
A. Virtual Teams
Managing virtual teams can be difficult. Virtual team members are frequently separated by both
geographic space and time, increasing the challenges of working together effectively
1. Virtual Team Leadership Skills
Working from different locations introduces challenges with communication, collaboration,
and the integration of the team members with the rest of the team and the broader
organization.
2. Leader Behaviors
The lack of face-to–face contact with virtual team members makes it difficult for leaders to
monitor team member performance and to implement solutions to work problems.
It is also difficult for virtual team leaders to perform typical mentoring, coaching, and
development functions.
3. Groupware and Group Decision Support Systems
Synchronous and asynchronous information technologies support members of virtual
teams.
B. Diversity and Multicultural Teams
Diversity can both help and hinder team effectiveness.
Diversity can be a source of creativity and innovation that can create a competitive advantage
and improve a team’s decision making.
Effectively managing diversity in teams has as much to do with the attitudes of team members
toward diversity as it does with the diversity of the team itself.
It is easy to assume that challenges in multicultural teams are just due to differing
communication styles, but differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority and conflicting
norms for decision making can also create barriers to a multicultural team’s ultimate success.
Global Issues: Increasing the Effectiveness of Multicultural Teams
Summary: How can a manager increase the effectiveness of multicultural teams? The best solution
Strategies:
1. Adaptation: seeing a problem as a cultural difference and not a personality issue
As one expert says, “The most fundamental thing is to be a role model for respect.” Managers and
multicultural team members must find ways to utilize each member’s strengths while minimizing
1. Direct versus Indirect Communication
Communication in Western cultures is typically direct and explicit, and a listener does not
have to know much about the context or the speaker to interpret it. In many other cultures,
2. Differing Attitudes toward Hierarchy and Authority
By design, teams have a rather flat structure. But team members from cultures in which
3. Conflicting Decision-Making Norms
Cultures differ substantially when it comes to how quickly decisions should be made and
Summary and Application
Groups and teams are not necessarily the same thing. All teams are groups, but not all groups are teams.
Common kinds of groups in organizations include workgroups, teams, and informal groups.
The five basic group performance factors are composition, size, norms, cohesiveness, and informal
leadership.
When a new group or team is formed, it typically goes through four stages of development: (1) mutual
acceptance, (2) communication and decision making, (3) motivation and productivity, and (4) control and
organization.
Discussion Questions
1. Identify several different groups that you belong to and classify them as one of the group types
discussed in this chapter.
2. Think about an effective team you have been on. What made it effective? Think about an
underperforming team you have been on. Why was it underperforming?
I serve on a grants committee, a virtual team comprises board members of the Texas Medical
Association Foundation (TMAF). Our clearly defined goal is to review applications and award grants
3. Are any of the groups to which you belong too large or too small to get their work done? If so,
what can the leader or the members do to alleviate the problem?
If a group is too small, additional members might be recruited or the task might be redefined to make
4. List two norms each for two of the groups to which you belong. How are these norms enforced?
5. Discuss the following statement: “Group cohesiveness is the good, warm feeling we get from
working in groups and is something that all group leaders should strive to develop in the groups
they lead.”
Students probably will agree with the statement that “group cohesiveness is the good, warm feeling
6. Some say that changing to a team-based arrangement “just makes sense” for organizations.
What are the four primary reasons why this might be so?
The four primary reasons for changing to a team-based organization are the four primary benefits that
should result for the organization: (1) enhanced performance for the organization; (2) better employee
7. Do you think a team contract would improve the effectiveness of teams? Why or why not?
8. Which do you feel is more important to team performance: informational diversity or
demographic diversity? Why? Do multicultural teams increase this type of diversity? If so,
how?
Informational diversity, diversity in knowledge and experience, is more important to team
Understand Yourself Exercise—How Well Do You Add Up as a Team
Member?
Students are to think about a group or team they’ve been a part of, then answer questions about the nature
of their participation. Students’ results will depend on their willingness to answer honestly and their
willingness to take the time needed to recall situations that apply to the questions.
Group Exercise
Learning Objective: This exercise demonstrates the benefits a group can bring to accomplishing a task.
Summary: Students perform the same task both individually and as part of a group.
Task:
Part 1: Students need a pen or pencil and an 8 × 11 sheet of paper. Have them work alone and do the
following:
1. Write the letters of the alphabet in a vertical column down the left side of the paper: A–Z.
Part 2: Divide the class, as evenly as possible, into groups of five to ten people. Instruct each group to
follow the procedure given in Part 1, writing the letters of the alphabet down the left side of a sheet of
paper, but this time in reverse order: Z–A. Dictate a new set of letters for the second column. The time
limit and scoring procedure are the same. The only difference is that the groups will generate the names.
Pfeiffer, an imprint of Jossey-Bass, Inc., Publishers. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Follow-up Questions
1. Are there differences in the average individual scores and the team scores? What are the
reasons for the differences, if any?
2. Although the team scores in this exercise usually are higher than the average individual scores,
under what conditions might individual averages exceed group scores?
Individual average scores might exceed group scores when there is a problem in group dynamics. As
Video Exercise
Videos and questions can be found in the eBook and MindTap video folder.
Evo Teamwork
Summary: For years Evo has supported athletic teams, but only recently did the Seattle-based e-
commerce company launch a formal work team. The new group, which comprises a photographer,
designer, and copywriter, is responsible for producing Evo’s magazine ads, promotions, and website
1. What organizational dilemma was hurting Evo’s creative output, and how did management
resolve the problem using teams?
Evo’s advertising and promotions campaigns were suffering due to the fact that the graphic designer,
2. How might Nathan Decker lead effectively as the team starts “norming”?
During the team’s norming phase, Decker should try to emphasize the ways in which the team has
3. Can you relate the group performance factors of composition, size, norms, cohesiveness, and
informal leadership to Evo?
The composition of the group appears homogeneous as each member does their job well and aims for
Now What?
Imagine being part of a group meeting with two coworkers and the boss to discuss a situation with a
customer who wants a 30 percent discount on an order because it will be a week late. The team can’t
agree on whether to give the discount to keep the good customer happy or not give the discount to make
more money on the sale, and is having trouble making a decision. What do you say or do? Go to this
chapter’s “Now What?” video, watch the challenge video, and choose a response.
OB Concepts Applied: team efficacy; cohesiveness; goal conflict; social loafing; problem-solving teams
Discussion Questions
1. Which team performance factors have the most influence on the decision-making process?
2. What teamwork competencies were most important for achieving a resolution and why?
The most important competency appeared to be Alex’s conflict resolution and communication
3. As a manager, what might you have done to handle the situation better? Please use group or
team concepts from the chapter.
This team needs to develop its team abilities for this situation and for the future.