TOPIC 7

Teams and Team Building

Teamwork
Individual employees perform operating tasks, but the vast majority of them work in
regular small groups where their efforts must fit together like the pieces of a picture puzzle.
Where their work is interdependent, they act as a task team and seek to develop a
cooperative state called teamwork. A task team is a cooperative small group in regular
contact that is engaged in coordinated action. The frequency of team members’ interaction
and the team’s ongoing existence make a task team clearly different from either a short-term
decision-making group (committee) or a project team in a matrix structure.

When the members of a task team know their objectives, contribute responsibly and
enthusiastically to the task, and support one another, they are exhibiting teamwork. At least
four ingredients contribute to the development of teamwork: a supportive environment,
skills matched to role requirements, superordinate goals, and team rewards. New teams
typically progress through a series of developmental stages,

Life Cycle of a Team

When a number of individuals begin to work at interdependent jobs, they often pass
through several stages as they learn to work together as a team. These stages of team
development are not rigidly followed, but they do represent a broad pattern that may be
observed and predicted in many settings across the team’s time together.
• Forming—Members share personal information, start to get to know and
accept one another, and begin turning their attention toward the group’s tasks.
An aura of courtesy prevails, and interactions are often cautious.
• Storming—Members compete for status, jockey for positions of relative
control, and argue about appropriate directions for the group. External
pressures interfere with the group, and tensions rise between individuals as
they assert themselves.
 • Norming—The group begins moving together in a cooperative fashion, and a
tentative balance among competing forces is struck. Group norms emerge to
guide individual behavior, and cooperative feelings are increasingly evident.
• Performing—The group matures and learns to handle complex challenges.
Functional roles are performed and fluidly exchanged as needed, and tasks are
efficiently accomplished.
• Adjourning—Even the most successful groups, committees, and project
teams disband sooner or later. Their breakup is called adjournment, which
requires dissolving intense social relations and returning to permanent
assignments. The adjournment stage is becoming even more frequent with the
advent of flexible organizations, which feature temporary groups.

Ingredients of Effective Team

Many studies have been conducted in an attempt to isolate the factors that contribute
most directly to team success. Common items identified include careful composition,
information sharing, clear direction and measurable goals for accountability, sufficient
resources, integration and coordination, flexibility and innovativeness, and the stimulation
of openness to learning. The discussion will focus on four major factors here—a supportive
environment, appropriate skills and role clarity, superordinate goals, and team rewards.
• Supportive Environment
Teamwork is most likely to develop when management builds a supportive
environment for it. Creating such an environment involves encouraging members to
think like a team, providing adequate time for meetings, and demonstrating faith in
members’ capacity to achieve. Supportive measures such as these help the group take
the necessary first steps toward teamwork. Since these steps contribute to further
cooperation, trust, and compatibility, supervisors need to develop an organizational
culture that builds these conditions.
• Skills and Role Clarity
Team members must be reasonably qualified to perform their jobs and have the
desire to cooperate. Beyond these requirements, members can work together as a
team only after all the members of the group know the roles of all the others with
whom they will be interacting. When this understanding exists, members can act
immediately as a team on the basis of the requirements of that situation, without
waiting for someone to give an order. In other words, team members respond
voluntarily to the demands of the job and take appropriate actions to accomplish
team goals.
• Superordinate Goals
A major responsibility of managers is to try to keep the team members oriented
toward their overall task. Sometimes, unfortunately, an organization’s policies,
record-keeping requirements, and reward systems may fragment individual efforts
and discourage teamwork.
 The supervisor in the case just described might consider the creation of a
superordinate goal, which is a higher goal that integrates the efforts of two or more
persons. Superordinate goals can be attained only if all parties carry their weight.
Such goals serve to focus attention, unify efforts, and stimulate more cohesive teams.
• Team Rewards
Another element that can stimulate teamwork is the presence of team rewards. These
may be financial, or they may be in the form of recognition. Rewards are most
powerful if they are valued by the team members, perceived as possible to earn, and
administered contingent on the group’s task performance.
• Empowered Teams
The previous discussion focused on four structural ingredients for effective teams.
Member motivation, however, plays a powerful role in team success, just as it does in
athletic teams playing baseball, basketball, or football. Team members will likely feel
more motivated and empowered when they:
o Share a sense of potency (have a can-do attitude)
o Experience meaningfulness (have a commitment to a worthwhile purpose)
o Are given autonomy (have freedom and discretion to control resources and
make decisions)
o See their impact on results (can assess, monitor, and celebrate their
contributions and results)

Potential Team Problems

1. Changing Composition - Being complex and dynamic, teamwork is sensitive to all
aspects of organizational environment. Like the mighty oak, teamwork grows slowly,
but on occasion it declines quickly, like that same oak crashing to the forest floor.
2. Social Loafing - Other potential problems also exist. The departure from classical
lines of authority may be difficult for some employees to handle responsibly. The
extensive participation in decision making consumes large amounts of time.
Experimentation with team activities may lead to charges of partiality from other
employees. Also, the combination of individual efforts may not result in improved
overall performance. For example, when employees think their contributions to a
group cannot be measured, they may lessen their output and engage in social loafing
(the free-rider effect). Causes of social loafing include a perception of unfair division
of labor, a belief that co-workers are lazy, or a feeling of being able to hide in a crowd
and therefore not be able to be singled out for blame. Social loafing may also arise if a
member believes that others intend to withhold their efforts and
thus he or she would be foolish not to do the same—the sucker effect.

TEAMBUILDING
Team building encourages team members to examine how they work together,
identify their weaknesses, and develop more effective ways of cooperating. The goal is to
make the team more effective. Team coaching is vital to team success—especially for new
teams. Coaching involves a leader’s intentional effort and interaction with a team to help its
members make appropriate use of their collective resources.

The Team-Building Process

Skills Useful in Team-Building

1. Process Consultation
Process consultation is a set of activities that help others focus on what is currently
happening around them. In effect, the process consultant holds up a mirror to team members
and helps them see themselves in action. The intent of process consultation is
straightforward: to help team members perceive, understand, and react constructively to
current behavioral events. Process consultants or team facilitators encourage employees to
examine their intended versus their actual roles within the team, the ways in which the team
discusses and solves problems, the use and abuse of power and authority, and the explicit
and implicit communication patterns.
 2. Feedback
Team members need feedback so that they have useful data on which to base
decisions. Feedback encourages them to understand how they are seen by others within
their team and to take self-correcting action.

Individual Territories versus Team Spaces

Many workers feel a need to establish their own employee territories—spaces they
can call their own, within which they can control what happens. Cubicles provide an
opportunity for them to have their own territory, design and modify their work layout, and
even decorate to their own satisfaction. Other organizations have created neighborhoods
of offices, which are centers of related individual offices to encourage the formation of social
groups. This layout builds on the idea that proximity, or closeness, creates greater
opportunities for interaction. The social groups that form contribute substantially toward
satisfying employee needs for belonging.

Self-managing Teams
One of the empowerment tools introduced -- self-managing teams—is also known
as self-reliant or self-directed teams. They are natural work groups that are given substantial
autonomy and in return are asked to control their own behavior and produce significant
results. The combination of empowerment and training to plan, direct, monitor, and control
their own activities distinguishes these teams from many others. They have wide-ranging
autonomy and freedom, coupled with the capability to act like managers.

Virtual Teams
Information technology has had powerful effects on individual behavior in
organizations, and its effects are equally strong on social networks at the team level.
Technology has allowed the emergence of virtual teams—groups that meet through the use
of technological aids without all of their members being present in the same location. These
teams, according to one observer, can be either “dramatic successes or dismal failures.”
Virtual teams often go through a developmental process parallel to that of other teams,
starting with unbridled optimism and proceeding through reality shock to refocusing of their
efforts to attain ultimate high performance.