Understanding Work Teams

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Chapter 10

• Understanding Work Teams

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Understanding Work Teams

• Differences Between Groups and Teams (Katzenback
  and Smith 1991)
• Work Group a group that interacts primarioy to
  share information and to make decisions
• Work Team generates positive synergy through
  coordinated effort
• Individual efforts result in a level of
  performance that is greater than the sum of the
  individual inputs
• See Exhibit 10 - 1

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Understanding Work Teams

• Types of Teams
• Problem solving teams (Shonk 1992 Verespej
  1992)
• 20 years ago usually comprised of 5 to 12 hourly
  employees from the same department who met for a
  few hours each week to discuss ways of improving
  processes and methods
• Rarely have authority to act unilaterally to
  implement their suggestions

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Understanding Work Teams

• Self-Managed Work Teams
• Groups of 10 to 15 employees who perform highly
  related or interdependent jobs and take on many
  of the responsibilities of their former
  supervisors.
• Includes planning and scheduling of work,
  assigning tasks to members, collective control
  over the pace of work, making operating
  decisions, taking action on problems, and working
  with suppliers and customers
• Fully self-managed work teams even select their
  own members and have the members evaluate each
  others performance.

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Understanding Work Teams

• Cross Functional Teams
• Teams made up of employees from about the same
  hierarchical level
• From different work area
• Come together to accomplish the same task
• Task force a temporary cross-functional team
• Committees comprised of members from across
  departmental lines

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Understanding Work Teams

• Cross Functional Teams (cont)
• Effective means for allowing people from divers
  areas within an organization to develop new ideas
  and solve problems and coordinate complex
  projects
• Early stages of development are time consuming as
  employees learn to work with diversity and
  complexity
• Takes time to build trust and teamwork

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Understanding Work Teams

• Virtual Teams
• Use computer technology to tie together
  physically dispersed members in order to achieve
  a common goal. (Lipnack and Stamps 2000 Gibson
  and Cohen 2003 Martin, Gibson and Maynard
  2004)
• Can convene for a few days to solve a problem, a
  few months to complete a project, or exist
  permanently (Kiser 1999)

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Understanding Work Teams

• Virtual Teams
• Primary factors differentiating work teams
• The absence of paraverbal and nonverbal cues
• Limited social context
• Ability to overcome time and space constraints

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Understanding Work Teams

• Creating Effective Teams
• Team Effectiveness Model Exhibit 10 3 in book
• Teams differ in form and structure
• Model should be used as a guide
• Model assumes that it has already been
  established that teamwork is preferable over
  individual work
• Creating effective teams in situations in which
  individuals can do the job better is equivalent
  to solving the wrong problem perfectly

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Understanding Work Teams

• Key components of effective teams
• Contextual
• Composition
• Work design
• Process variables

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Understanding Work Teams

• Key components of effective teams (cont)
• Context
• Adequate resources timely information, proper
  equipment, adequate staffing, encouragement,
  administrative assistance (Hyatt and Ruddy)

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Understanding Work Teams

• Key components of effective teams (cont)
• Context (cont)
• Leadership and structure
• team members must ensure that all members
  contribute equally to the work load. (LaFausto
  and Larson 2002)
• Self-managed work teams often perform better than
  teams with formally appointed leaders (Beckun
  1989)
• Leaders can obstruct high performance when the
  interfere with self-managing teams (Cohen,
  Ledford and Spreitzer 1996 Druskat and
  Wheeler2003)
• Leaders who expect good things from their teams
  are more likely to get them (Eden 1990)
• Leaders who exhibit a positive mood get better
  team performance and lower turnover (George and
  Bettenhausen 1990 George 1995 Brief and
  Weiss 2002)

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Understanding Work Teams

• Key components of effective teams (cont)
• Context (cont)
• Trust
• Members of teams must trust each other and their
  leaders (Dirks 2000 Dirks and Williams 2001)
• Performance Evaluation and Reward Systems
• Individual oriented evaluation and reward systems
  must be modified to reflect team performance
  (Johnson 1993 McClurg 2001)

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Understanding Work Teams

• Key components of effective teams (cont)
• Composition
• Abilities of members (Stevens and Campion 1994)
• Technical expertise
• Problem solving and decision making skills
• Interpersonal skills
• Personality
• Big Five Model - teams that rate higher in in
  mean levels of extroversion, agreeableness,
  conscientiousness, openness to experience and
  emotional stability tend to receive higher
  managerial ratings for team performance (Barrick,
  Stewart, Neuberg and Mount 1998 Neuman and
  Wright 1999 Moynihan and Peterson 2001)

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Understanding Work Teams

• Key components of effective teams (cont)
• Allocating roles
• Exhibit 10-4 in book
• Successful work teams have people to fill all
  these roles and have selected people to play
  these roles base on their skills and preferences
  (Margerison and McCann 1990)

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Understanding Work Teams

• Key components of effective teams (cont)
• Diversity
• Heterogeneous teams are more likely to have
  diverse abilities and information and should be
  more effective (Guzzo and Shea 1002 Jackson,
  May and Whitney 1995 Williams and OReilly
  1998 Linnehan and Konrad 1999 van Knippenberg,
  De Dreu and Homan 2004)
• Teams divers in personality, gender, age,
  education, functional specialization, and
  experience increases the probability that the
  team will posses the needed characteristics to
  complete its tasks effectively
• Group Demography the degree to which members of
  a group share common demographics

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Understanding Work Teams

• Key components of effective teams (cont)
• Diversity (cont)
• Cohorts individuals who hold a common attribute
• Turnover will be greater among those with
  dissimilar experience because communication is
  more difficult resulting in greater conflict and
  power struggles making group membership less
  attractive
• Large gaps between cohorts increases turnover
• Discontinuities or bulges in the groups
  date-of-entry distribution are likely to result
  in a higher turnover rate within that group

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Understanding Work Teams

• Diversity (cont)
• Size of teams
• The most effective teams have fewer that 10
  members
• When teams have excess members, cohesiveness and
  mutual accountability declines, social loafing
  increases, and more people do less talking
  relative to others.
• Large teams have trouble coordinating with one
  another, especially when time pressure is present

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Understanding Work Teams

• Diversity (cont)
• Member Flexibility
• Teams made up of flexible individuals have
  members who can complete each others tasks
• Improves adaptability and makes it less reliant
  on any single member

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Understanding Work Teams

• Diversity (cont)
• Member Preferences - Given the option, many
  employees will select themselves out of team
  participation
• Creates a direct threat to team morale and to
  individual member satisfaction
• Suggests that when selecting team members,
  individual preferences should be considered as
  well personality and skills

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Understanding Work Teams

• Work Design
• The following increase team effectiveness
• Freedom
• Autonomy
• Opportunity to use different skills
• Ability to complete who tasks
• Project must have substantial impact on other

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Understanding Work Teams

• Process
• Common purpose
• Effective teams have a common and meaningful
  purpose that provides direction, momentum and
  commitment for members
• Put tremendous amount of time and effort into
  discussing, shaping, and agreeing on a purpose
  that belongs to them collectively and individually

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Understanding Work Teams

• Specific goals
• Successful teams translate their common purpose
  into specific, measurable and realistic
  performance goals.
• Team goals should be challenging

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Understanding Work Teams

• Team Efficacy
• Effective teams have confidence in themselves
• Small successes build team confident
• Managers should provide training to improve
  members technical and interpersonal skills

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Understanding Work Teams

• Conflict levels
• Conflict isnt necessarily bad
• Conflict can improve team performance
• Relationship conflicts are almost always
  dysfunctional except for non routine activities

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Understanding Work Teams

• Social loafing
• Individuals can hide within a group and coast on
  the groups effort because their individual
  contributions cant be identified
• Effective teams undermine this tendency by
  holding themselves accountable at both the
  individual and team level