Team dynamics - summary of chapter 8 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Organizational Behavior
Chapter 8
Team dynamics

Teams and informal groups

Teams: groups of two or more people who interact with and influence each other, are mutually accountable for achieving common goals associated with organizational objectives, and perceive themselves as a social entity within an organization.

All teams exist to fulfill some purpose.
Team members are held together by their interdependence and need for collaboration to achieve common goals.
Team members influence each other.
A team exist when it members perceive themselves as a team.

Each type of team in an organization can be distinguished by three characteristics:

• Team permanence
  How long that type of team usually exists
• Skill diversity
  Members possess different skills and knowledge
• Authority dispersion
  The degree that decision-making responsibility is distributed throughout the team

Informal groups

Why do informal groups exist?

• Human beings are social animals
• Social identity theory
• They accomplish personal objectives that cannot be achieved by individuals working alone.
• We are comforted by the mere presence of other people

Informal groups and organizational outcomes

Informal groups potentially minimize employee stress. This improves employee well-being.
Informal groups are the backbone of social networks.

Advantages and disadvantages of teams

In many situations, people are potentially more motivated when working in teams than when working alone.

• Employees have a drive to bond and are motivated to fulfill the goals of groups to which they belong
• Accountability to fellow team members
• Coworkers become benchmarks of comparison

The challenges of teams

Process losses: resources (including time and energy) expended toward team development and maintenance rather than the task.
Amplified when more people are added or replace others on the team.

Brooks’s law: the principle that adding more people to a late software project only makes it later.

Social loafing

Social loafing: the problem that occurs when people exert less effort (and usually perform at a lower level) when working in teams than when working alone.
A motivational process loss.

More pervasive when:

• Individual performance is hidden or difficult to distinguish from the performance of other team members
• When the work is boring or the team’s overall task has low significance
• Individual characteristics
• Lack motivation to help the team achieve goals
• When employees believe they have little control over the team’s success.

Social loafers provide only as much effort as they believe others will provide.

Ways to minimize social loafing:

• Form smaller teams
• Specialize tasks
• Measure individual performance
• Increase job enrichment
• Select motivated, team-oriented employees

A model of team effectiveness

A team is effective when it benefits the organization and its members, and its survives long enough to accomplish its mandate.

Organizational and team environment

The organizational and team environment represents all conditions beyond the team’s boundaries that influence its effectiveness.
Team members tend to work together more effectively when

• They receive some team-based rewards.
• The organization’s structure assigns discrete clusters of work activity to teams
• Information systems support team coordination
• The physical layout of the team’s workspace encourages frequent communication

The environment also generates drives for change within teams

• External competition
• Changing societal expectations

Team design elements

Task characteristics

Teams work better when the work is well structured rather than ambiguous or novel.

Low task variability: the same set of tasks every day
Low task analyzability: the work is predictable enough for well-established procedures

The main benefit for well-structured tasks is that it is easier to coordinate the work among several people.

Teams can perform less structured tasks reasonably well then their roles are well defined.

Task interdependence: the extent to which team members must share materials, information, or expertise in order to perform their jobs.
Three levels of task interdependence

• Pooled interdependence
  When an employee or work unit shares a common resource. Each member works alone but shares raw materials.
• Sequential interdependence
  The output of one person becomes the direct input for another person or unit
• Reciprocal interdependence
  Work output is exchanges back and forth among individuals

The higher the level of task interdependence, the greater the need to organize people into teams.
A team structure improves interpersonal communication and thus results in better coordination
High task interdependence motivates most people to be part of the team

Team size

Teams should be large enough to provide the necessary abilities and viewpoints to perform the work, yet small enough to maintain efficient coordination and meaningful involvement of each member.
Small teams operate effectively because they have less process loss.

Team composition

Team effectiveness depends on the qualities of people who are members of those teams.
Teams perform better when their members are highly motivated, possess the required abilities, and have clear role perceptions to perform the assigned task activities.
Teams need people who are motivated and able to work effectively in teams.

The five C’s

• Cooperating
• Coordinating
• Communicating
• Comforting
• Conflict handling

Team diversity

Has both positive and negative effects

Advantages

• They make better decisions
• Often provide better representation of the team’s constituents

Challenges

• Takes longer to become a high-performing team

Team processes

Team development

Team members must resolve several issues and pass through several stages of development before emerging as an effective work unit.

Team development

• Forming
  A period of testing and orientation in which members learn about each other and evaluate the benefits and costs of continued membership
• Storming
  Interpersonal conflict as members become more proactive and compete for various team roles. Members try to establish norms of appropriate behavior and performance standards.
• Norming
  The team develops its first real sense of cohesion as roles are established and a consensus forms around group objectives and a common or complementary team-based mental model
• Performing
  Team members hare learned to efficiently coordinate and resolve conflicts.
• Adjourning
  The team is about to disband

Developing team identities and mental models

Two sets of processes that are the essence of team development:

• Developing team identity
  Team development occurs when employees make the team part of their social identity and take ownership of the team’s success
• Developing team mental models and coordinating routine

Team roles

Role: a set of behaviors that people are expected to perform because they hold certain positions in a team and organization.

Many team roles aren’t formally embedded in job descriptions. They are informally assigned or claimed as part of the team development process.

Accelerating team development trough team building

Team building: a process that consists of formal activities intended to improve the development and functioning of a work team.
Team building interventions are often organized into the following four categories:

• Goal setting
• Problem solving
• Role clarification
• Interpersonal relations

Team norms

Norms: the informal rules and shared expectations that groups establish to regulate the behavior of their members.

How team norms develop

Norms develop during team formation because people need to anticipate or predict how others will act.

• Subtle events during the team’s initial interactions can plant norms
• Norms form as team members discover behavior that help them function more effectively
• The experiences and values that members bring to the team

Preventing and changing dysfunctional team norms

The best way to establish desirable norms is to clearly state them when the team is created.

Team norms can be organizationally induced.
Introduce teambased rewards that counter dysfunctional norms.
Disband the group and form a new team whose members have more favorable norms.

Team cohesion

Team cohesion: the degree of attraction people feel toward the team and their motivation to remain members.

Influences on team cohesion

Six of the most important influences:

• Member similarity
• Team size
• Member interaction
• Somewhat difficult entry
• Team success
• External competition and challenges

Consequences of team cohesion

Teams with higher cohesion tend to perform better than those with low cohesion.
The team’s existence depends on a minimal level of cohesion.

The relationship between team cohesion and team performance depends on two conditions

• Team cohesion has less effect on team performance when the team has low task interdependence
• The effect of cohesion on team performance depends on whether the team’s norms are compatible with or opposed to the organizational objectives.

Teams with higher cohesion perform better, and teams with better performance become more cohesive.

Team trust

Any relationship depends on a certain degree of trust.
Trust: positive expectations one person has toward another person in situations involving risk.
Trust is ultimately perceptual.

Trust is built on tree foundations:

• Calculus based trust
  A logical calculation that other team members will act appropriately because they face sanctions if their actions violate reasonable expectations.
• Knowledge-based trust
  Based on the predictability of another team member’s behavior. This predictability refers only to positive expectations.
• Identification-based trust
  Based on mutual understanding and an emotional bond among team members.

Dynamics on team trust

Employees typically join a team with a moderate or high level of trust in their new coworkers. Swift trust.
People usually believe fellow team members are reasonably competent.

Self-directed teams

Self-directed teams (SDTs): cross-functional work groups that are organized around work processes, complete and entire piece of work requiring several interdependent tasks, and have substantial autonomy over the execution of those tasks.

Success factors for self-directed teams

The successful implementation of self-directed teams depends on several factors:

• SDTs should be responsible for an entire work process
• SDTs should have sufficient autonomy to organize and coordinate their work
• SDTs are more successful when the work site and technology support coordination and communication among team members and increase job enrichment

Virtual teams

Virtual teams: teams whose members operate across space, time, and organizational boundaries and are linked trough information technologies to achieve organizational tasks.

Virtual teams differ from traditional teams in two ways:

• Their members are not usually co-located
• Due to their lack of co-location, members of virtual teams depend primarily on information technologies rather than face-to-face interaction to communicate and coordinate their work effort.

Team virtually increases with the geographic dispersion of team members.

Success factors for virtual teams

Virtual teams face all the challenges of traditional teams, compounded by problems arising from time and distance.

Strategies to minimize most virtual team problems.

• Virtual team members need to apply the effective team behaviors described earlier
• Good communication technology skills
• A toolkit of communication channels as well as the freedom to choose the channels that work best for them.
• Plenty of structure
• Virtual team members should meet face-to-face fairly early in the team development process

Team decision making

Constraints on team cohesion making

Time constraints

Teams consume time
Production blocking: a time constraint in team decision making due to the procedural requirement that only one person may speak at a time

Evaluation apprehension

A decision-making problem that occurs when individuals are reluctant to mention ideas that seem silly because they believe (often correctly) that other team members are silently evaluating them.

Pressure to conform

Team cohesion leads employees to conform to the team’s norms. It may cause team members to suppress their dissenting opinions, particularly when a strong team norm is related to the issue.

Overconfidence (inflated team efficacy)

Team efficacy: the collective belief among team members in the team’s capability to successfully complete a task.
Teams make worse decisions when they become overconfident and develop a false sense of invulnerability.

Improving creative decision making in teams

Brainstorming

Participants try to think up as many ideas as possible.
Rules

• Speak freely
• Don’t criticize others or their ideas
• Provide as many ideas as possible
• Build on the ideas that others have presented

Brainwriting

A variation of brainstorming whereby participants write (rather than speak about) and share their ideas.

Electronic brainstorming

A form of brainwriting that relies on networked computers for submitting and sharing creative ideas.

Nominal group technique

A variation of brainwriting consisting of three stages in which participants:

• Silently and independently document their ideas
• Collectively describe these ideas to the other team members without critique
• Silently and independently evaluate the ideas presented.