MCom I Semester Understanding work Teams Study Material Notes
Table of Contents
MCom I Semester Understanding work Teams Study Material Notes : Differences between groups and teams Types of Teams Problems solving teams Self-managed work Teams cross-functional teams Virtual teams creating effective teams Composition Context process Shaping Team Platers Turning Individuals into Team Players Qualit management Always the Answer Summary Implication managers :
BCom 2nd Year Cost Accounting Cost Audit Study Material Notes in Hindi
Why Have Teams Become So Popular?
Twenty-five years ago, when companies like W.L. Gore, Volvo, and General Foods introduced teams into their production processes, it made news because no one else was doing it. Today, it’s just the opposite. It’s the organization that don’use teams that has become newsworthy. Approximately 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies now have half or more of their employees on teams. And 68 percent of small U.S. manufacturers are using teams in their production areas.
How do we explain the current popularity of teams? The evidence suggests that teams typically outperform individuals when the tasks being done require multiple skills, judgment, and experience. As organizations have restructured themselves to compete more effectively and efficiently. they have turned to teams as a better way to use emplovee talents. Management has found that teams are more flexible and responsive to changing events than are traditional departments or other forms of permanent groupings. Teams have the capability to quickly assemble, deploy, refocus, and disband.
But don’t overlook the motivational properties of teams. Consistent with our discussion in Chapter 7 of the role of employee involvement as a motivator, teams facilitate employee participation in operating decisions. For instance, some assembly-line workers at John Deere are part of sales teams that call on customers. These workers know the products better than any traditional salesperson; and by traveling and speaking with farmers, these hourly workers develop new skills and become more involved in their jobs. So another explanation for the popularity of teams is that they are an effective means for management to democratize their organizations and increase employee motivation
Differences Between Groups and Teams
Groups and teams are not the same thing. In this section, we want to define and clarify the difference between a work group and a work team.”
in the previous chapter, we defined a group as two or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular objectives. 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.
work groups have no need or opportunity to engage in collective work that requires joint effort. So their performance is merely the summation of each group member’s individual contribution. There is no positive synergy that would create an overall level of performance that is greater than the sum of the inputs.
A work team generates positive synergy through coordinated effort. Their individual efforts results in a level of performance that is greater than the sum of those individual inputs. Exhibit 9.1 highlights the differences between work groups and work teams.
These definitions help clarify why so many organizations have recently restructured work processes around teams. Management is looking for that positive synergy that will allow their orga nizations to increase performance. The extensive use of teams creates the potential for an organiza tion to generate greater outputs with no increase in inputs. Notice, however, we said “potential.” There is nothing inherently magical in the creation of teams that ensures the achievement of this positive synergy. Merely calling a group a team doesn’t automatically increase its performance. As we show later in this chapter, effective teams have certain common characteristics. If management hopes to gain increases in organizational performance through the use of teams, it will need to ensure that its teams possess these characteristics.
Types of Teams
Teams can do a variety of things. They can make products, provide services, negotiate deals, coordinate projects, offer advice, and make decisions. In this section we’ll describe the four most common types of teams you’re likely to find in an organization: problem-solving teams, self-managed work teams, Cross-functional teams, and virtual teams (see Exhibit 9-2).
Problem Solving Teams
If we look back 20 years or so, teams were just beginning to grow in popularity, and most of those teams took similar form. These were typically composed of 5 to 12 hourly employees from the same
A group that interacts share information and to one to help each group form within his or her area.
work team A group whose individual efforts result in a performance that is greater than the sum of the individual inputs department who met for a few hours each week to discuss ways of improving quality, efficiency, and the work environment. We call these problem-solving teams.
In problem-solving teams, members share ideas or offer suggestions on how work processes and methods can be improved: although they rarely have the authority to unilaterally implement any of their suggested actions. For instance, Merrill Lynch created a problem-solving team to specifically figure out ways to reduce the number of days it took to open up a new cash management account. By suggesting cuts in the number of steps in the process from 16 to 36, the team was able to reduce the average number of days from 15 to 8
Self-Managed Work Teams
Problem-solving teams were on the right track but they didn’t go far enough in getting employees involved in work-related decisions and processes. This led to experimentation with truly autonomous teams that could not only solve problems but implement solutions and take full responsibility for outcomes.
Self-managed work teams are groups of employees (typically 10 to 15) who perform highly related or interdependent jobs and take on many of the responsibilities of their former supervisors. Typically, this 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 other’s performance. As a result, supervisory positions take on decreased importance and may even be eliminated.
A factory at Eaton Corp’s Aeroquip Global Hose Division provides an example of how self-managed teams are being used in industry. Located in the heart of Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains, this factory makes hydraulic hose that is used in trucks, tractors, and other heavy equipment. In 1994, to improve quality and productivity, Eaton-Aeroquip’s management threw out the assembly line and organized the plant’s 285 workers into more than 50 self-managed teams. Workers were suddenly free to participate in decisions that were previously reserved solely for management-for instance, the teams set their own schedules, selected new members, negotiated with suppliers, made calls on customers, and disciplined members who created problems. And the results? Between 1993 and 1999 response time to customer concerns improved 99 percent; productivity and manufacturing output both increased by more than 50 percent; and accident rates dropped by more than half.
Business periodicals have been chock full of articles describing successful applications of selfmanaged teams. But a word of caution needs to be offered. Some organizations have been disap pointed with the results from self-managed teams. For instance, they don’t seem to work well during organizational downsizing. Employees often view cooperating with the team concept as an exercise in assisting one’s own executioner.” The overall research on the effectiveness of self-managed work teams has not been uniformly positive. Moreover, although individuals on these teams do tend to report higher levels of job satisfaction, they also sometimes have higher absenteeism and turnover rates. Inconsistency in findings suggests that the effectiveness of self-managed teams is situation dependent. 15 In addition to downsizing, factors such as the strength and make-up of team norms, the type of tasks the team undertakes, and the reward structure can significantly influence how well the team performs. Finally, care needs to be taken when introducing self-managed teams globally. For instance, evidence suggests that these types of teams have not fared well in Mexico largely because of that culture’s low tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty and employees’ strong respect for hierarchical authority
Cross-functional Teams The Boeing Company created a team made up of employees from production, planning, quality, tooling, design engineering, and information systems to automate shims on the company’s C-17 program. The team’s suggestions resulted in drastically reduced cycle time, cost, and improved quality on the C17 program.
This Boeing example illustrates the use of cross-functional teams. These are teams made up of employees from about the same hierarchical level, but from different work areas, who come together to accomplish a task.
Many organizations have used horizontal, boundary spanning groups for decades. For example IBM created a large task force in the 1960s-made up of employees from across departments in the company to develop its highly successful System 360. And a task force is really nothing other than a temporary cross-functional team. Similarly, committees composed of members from across departe mental lines are another example of cross-functional teams. But the popularity of cross-discipline work teams exploded in the late 1980s. For instance, all the major automobile manufacturers including Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW, GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler-currently use this form of team to coordinate complex projects. And Harley-Davidson relies on specific cross-functional teams to manage each line of its motorcycles. These teams include Harley employees from design, manufacturing, and purchasing, as well as representatives from key outside suppliers.16
Mahindra & Mahindra has adopted Integrated Design and Manufacturing (IDAM), a product development process. The IDAM team consists of cross-functional teams covering every aspect of product development, from design and development, testing and validation, to manufacturing, M&M tied up with the best in the world in their respective areas of the global auto industry-Fukui, Japan, for its press shop: Fuji Japan for dies; the Korean company Wooshin for its body shop: Fori Automation, U.S. for the tester line for final assembly: Dura, Germany, for its paint shop: Lear, U.S. for seats and interiors: Viston, U.S. for exteriors: Samlip, Korea for suspension; BEHR, Germany, for air conditioning and Renault for petrol engines. The vendors set up facilities in and around the factory and M&M played the role of an integrator. M&M did not compromise on international quality and at the same time ensured that the product was fully Indian. Project Scorpio had just 120 people. These people worked in tandem, round the clock, to develop a product unsurpassed in its design and manufacturing. The IDAM teams of Scorpio were divided into 19 cross-functional design teams with people from design and development, testing and validation, marketing, manufacturing, and supplier development.
Cross-functional teams are an effective means for allowing people from diverse areas within an organization (or even between organizations) to exchange information, develop new ideas and solve problems, and coordinate complex projects. Of course, cross-functional teams are no picnic to manage. Their early stages of development are often very time-consuming as members learn to work with diversity and complexity. It takes time to build trust and teamwork, especially among people from different backgrounds with different experiences and perspectives.
Virtual Teams
The previous types of teams do their work face to face. Virtual teams use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members in order to achieve a common goal. They allow people to collaborate online-using communication links like wide-area networks, video conferencing, or e-mail-whether they’re only a room away or continents apart.
Virtual teams can do all the things that other teams do-share information, make decisions, complete tasks. And they can include members from the same organization or link an organization’s members with employees from other organizations (i.e., suppliers and joint partners). They can convene for a few days to solve a problem, a few months to complete a project, or exist permanently.
The three primary factors that differentiate virtual teams from face-to-face teams are: (1) the absence of paraverbal and nonverbal cues; (2) limited social context; and (3) the ability to overcome time and space constraints. In face-to-face conversation, people use paraverbal (tone of voice, inflection, voice volume) and nonverbal (eye movement, facial expression, hand gestures, and other body language) cues. These help clarity communication by providing increased meaning, but aren’t avail able in online interactions. Virtual teams often suffer from less social rapport and less direct interac tion among members. They aren’t able to duplicate the normal give and take of face-to-face discus sion. Especially when members haven’t personally met, virtual teams tend to be more task-oriented and exchange less social-emotional information. Not surprisingly, virtual team members report less satisfaction with the group interaction process than do face-to-face teams. Finally, virtual teamsable to do their work even if members are thousands of miles apart and separated by a dozen or more time zones. It allows people to work together who might otherwise never be able to collaborate.
Wipro Technologies, for instance, has a Meet Your People Programmed (MYPP), which provides a framework for helping managers interact with their teams on a sustained basis throughout the year. Business strategy meetings, goals and objectives selling, appraisal discussions, career discussion meetings, new manager assimilation meetings, monthly plan meetings, skip level meetings, project meetings and social events are a part of MYPP. The company also has a ‘war room’. War rooms become a necessity when large teams, which are geographically dispersed, need to collaborate on a real time basis to discuss, co-ordinate and accomplish their individual but inter-related activities, which lead to the common goal. At ICICI InfoTech, the knowledge management platform is an effective way of bridging people. The company also streams on cross-cultural training. Discussion boards and e-groups are two other popular ways of keeping in touch for effective working. 20
Creating Effective Teams
There is no shortage of efforts at trying to identify factors related to team effectiveness. 2. However, recent studies have taken what was once a “veritable laundry list of characteristics and organized them into a relatively focused model.” Exhibit 9-3 summarizes what we currently know about what makes teams effective. As you’ll see, it builds on many of the group concepts introduced in the previous chapter.
The following discussion is based on the model in Exhibit 9-3. Keep in mind two caveats before we proceed. First, teams differ in form and structure. Since the model we present attempts to generalize across all varieties of teams, you need to be careful not to apply the model’s predictions rigidly to all teams. 24 The model should be used as a guide, not as an inflexible prescription. Second, the model assumes that it’s already been determined 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
The key components making up effective teams can be subsumed into four general categories. First is the resources and other contextual influences that make teams effective. The second relates to the team’s composition. The third category is work design. Finally, process variables reflect those things that go on in the team that influences effectiveness
What does team effectiveness mean in this model? Typically this has included objective measures of the team’s productivity, managers’ ratings of the team’s performance, and aggregate measures of member satisfaction.
Context
The four contextual factors that appear to be most significantly related to team performance are the presence of adequate resources, effective leadership, a climate of trust, and a performance evaluation and reward system that reflects team contributions.
Adequate Resources Teams are part of a larger organization system. A research team at Hindus. tan Glass Ware, for instance, must live within the budgets, policies, and practices set by the company’s corporate offices. As such, all work teams rely on resources outside the group to sustain it. And a scarcity of resources directly reduces the ability of the team to perform its job effectively. As one set of researchers concluded, after looking at 13 factors potentially related to group performance, “perhaps one of the most important characteristics of an effective workgroup is the support the group receives from the organization. This support includes timely information, proper equipment, adequate staffing, encouragement, and administrative assistance. Teams must receive the necessary support from management and the larger organization if they are going to succeed in achieving their goals.
Leadershlp and Structure Team members must agree on who is to do what and ensure that all members contribute equally in sharing the workload. In addition, the team needs to determine how schedules will be set, what skills need to be developed, how the group will resolve conflicts, and how the group will make and modify decisions. Agreeing on the specifics of work and how they fit together to integrate individual skills requires team leadership and structure. This can be provided directly by management or by the team members themselves.
Leadership, of course, isn’t always needed. For instance, the evidence indicates that self-managed work teams often perform better than teams with formally appointed leaders. And leaders can obstruct high performance when they interfere with self-managing teams. On self-managed teams, team members absorb many of the duties typically assumed by managers.
On traditionally managed teams, we find that two factors seem to be important in influencing team performance-the leader’s expectations and his or her mood. Leaders who expect good things from their team are more likely to get them. For instance, military platoons under leaders who held high expectations performed significantly better in training than control platoons. In addition, studies have found that leaders who exhibit a positive mood get better team performance and lower turnover. 30
Climate of Trust Members of effective teams trust each other. And they also exhibit trust in their leaders. Interpersonal trust among team members facilitates cooperation, reduces the need to monitor each others’ behavior, and bonds members around the belief that others on the team won’t take advantage of them. Team members, for instance, are more likely to take risks and expose vulnerabilities when they believe they can trust others on their team. Similarly, as we’ll show in Chapter 12, trust is the foundation of leadership. Trust in leadership is important in that it allows the team to be willing to accept and commit to their leader’s goals and decisions. Performance Evaluation and Reward Systems How do you get team members to be both individually and jointly accountable? The traditional, individually oriented evaluation and reward system must be modified to reflect team performances
Individual performance evaluations, fixed hourly wages, individual incentives, and the like are not consistent with the development of high-performance teams. So in addition to evaluating and rewarding employees for their individual contributions, management should consider group-based appraisals, profit sharing, gainsharing, small group incentives, and other system modifications that will reinforce team effort and commitment.
Composition
This category includes variables that relate to how teams should be staffed. In this section, we’ll address the ability and personality of team members, allocating roles and diversity, size of the team, member flexibility, and members’ preference for teamwork.
Abilities of Members Part of a team’s performance depends on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of its individual members. It’s true that we occasionally read about the athletic team composed of mediocre players who, because of excellent coaching, determination, and precision teamwork, beats a far more talented group of players. But such cases make the news precisely because they represent an aberration. As the old saying goes, “The race doesn’t always go to the swiftest nor the battle to the strongest, but that’s the way to bet.” A team’s performance is not merely the summation of its individual members’ abilities. However, these abilities set parameters for what members can do and how effectively they will perform on a team.
To perform effectively, a team requires three different types of skills. First, it needs people with technical expertise. Second, it needs people with problem-solving and decision-making skills to be able to identify problems, generate alternatives, evaluate those alternatives, and make competent choices. Finally, teams need people with good listening, feedback, conflict resolution, and other interpersonal skills,
No team can achieve its performance potential without developing all three types of skills. The right mix is crucial. Too much of one at the expense of others will result in lower team performance. But teams don’t need to have all the complementary skills in place at their beginning. It’s not uncommon for one or more members to take responsibility to learn the skills in which the group is deficient, thereby allowing the team to reach its full potential.
Personality We demonstrated in Chapter 4 that personality has a significant influence on individual employee behavior. This can also be extended to team behavior. Many of the dimensions identified in the Big Five personality model have been shown to be relevant to team effectiveness. Specifically, teams that rate higher in mean levels of extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability tend to receive higher managerial ratings for team performance.54
Very interestingly, the evidence indicates that the variance in personality characteristics may be more important than the mean. So, for example, while higher mean levels of conscientiousness on cam is desirable mixing both conscientious and not-so-conscientious members tends to lower performance. This may be because, in such teams, members who are highly conscientious not only must perform their own tasks but also must perform or redo the tasks of low-conscientious members. It may also be because such diversity leads to feelings of contribution inequity.” Another interesting finding related to personality is that one bad apple can spoil the barrel.” A single team member who lacks a minimal level of, say, agreeableness, can negatively affect the whole team’s performance. So including just one person who is low on agreeableness, conscientiousness, or extroversion can result in strained internal processes and decreased overall performance. Allocating Roles Teams have different needs, and people should be selected for a team to ensure that all various roles are filled.
We can identify nine potential team roles (sce Exhibit 9-1). Successful work teams have people to fill all these roles and have selected people to play these roles based on their skills and preferences. 18 (On many teams, individuals will play multiple roles.) 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 that fit with members’ preferred styles. By matching individual preferences with team role demands, managers increase the likelihood that the team members will work well together.
Diversity As previously noted, most team activities require a variety of skills and knowledge. Give this requirement, it would be reasonable to conclude that heterogeneous teams-those composed of dissimilar individuals would be more likely to have diverse abilities and information and should be more effective. Research studies generally substantiate this conclusion, especially on cognitive, creativity-demanding tasks.39
When a team is diverse in terms of personality, gender, age, education, functional specialization, and experience, there is an increased probability that the team will possess the needed characteristics to complete its tasks effectively.40 The team may be more conflict-laden and less expedient as varied positions are introduced and assimilated, but the evidence generally supports the conclusion that heterogeneous teams perform more effectively than do those that are homogeneous. Essentially, diversity promotes conflict, which stimulates creativity, which leads to improved decision making.
Understanding work Teams
But what about diversity created by racial or national differences? The evidence indicates that these elements of diversity interfere with team processes, at least in the short term. Cultural diversity seems to be an asset for tasks that call for a variety of viewpoints. But culturally heterogeneous teams have more difficulty in learning to work with each other and in solving problems. The good news is that these difficulties seem to dissipate with time. Although newly formed culturally diverse teams underperform newly formed culturally homogeneous teams, the differences disappear after about three months. The reason is that it takes culturally diverse teams a while to learn how to work through disagreements and different approaches to solving problems.
An offshoot of the diversity issue has received a great deal of attention by group and team researchers. This is the degree to which members of a group share a common demographic attribute, such as age, sex, race, educational level, or length of service in the organization, and the impact of this attribute on turnover. We call this variable group demography,
We discussed individual demographic factors in Chapter 2. Here we consider the same type of factors, but in a group context. That is, it’s not whether a person is male or female or has been employed with the organization for a year rather than 10 years that concerns us now, but rather the individual’s attribute in relationship to the attributes of others with whom he or she works. Let’s work through the logic of group demography, review the evidence, and then consider the implications.
Groups, teams, and organizations are composed of cohorts, which we define as individuals who hold a common attribute. For instance, everyone born in 1960 is of the same age. This means they also have shared common experiences. People born in 1970 have experienced the information revolution, but not the Korean conflict, and people born around 1920-30 shared India’s indepence struggle. Women in Indian organizations today who were born before 1945 and similarly, those when after 1970 have different experiences from women born after 1960. Group demography, therefore, suggests that attributes such as age or the date that someone joins a specific work team or organization should help us to predict turnover. Essentially, the logic goes like this: Turnover will be greater among those with dissimilar experiences because communication is more difficult. Conflict and power struggles are more likely, and more severe when they occur. The increased conflict makes group membership less attractive, so employees are more likely to quit. Similarly, the losers in a power struggle are more apt to leave voluntarily or to be forced out.
A number of studies have sought to test this thesis, and the evidence is quite encouraging. For example, in departments or separate work groups in which a large portion of members entered at the same time, there is considerably more turnover among those outside this cohort. Also, when there are large gaps between cohorts, turnover is higher. People who enter a group or an organization together, or at approximately the same time, are more likely to associate with one another, have a similar perspective on the group or organization, and thus be more likely to stay. On the other hand, discontinuities or
The implication of this line of inquiry is that the composition of a team may be an important predictor of turnover. Differences per se may not predict turnover. But large differences within a single team will lead to turnover. If everyone is moderately dissimilar from everyone else in a team, the feelings of being an outsider are reduced. So, it’s the degree of dispersion on an attribute, rather than the level, that matters most.
Size of Teams The president of AOL Technologies says the secret to a great team is: “Think small. Ideally, your team should have seven to nine people.”* His advice is supported by evidence. Generally speaking, the most effective teams have fewer than 10 members. And experts suggest using the smallest number of people who can do the task. Unfortunately, there is a pervasive tendency for managers to err on the side of making teams too large. While a minimum of four or five may be necessary to develop diversity of views and skills, managers seem to seriously underestimate how coordination problems can geometrically increase as team members are added. When teams have excess members, cohesiveness and mutual accountability declines, social loafing increases, and more and more people do less talking relative to others. So in designing effective teams, managers should try to keep their number under 10. If a natural working unit is larger and you want a team effort, consider breaking the group into sub teams.
Understanding work Teams
Member Flexibility Teams made up of flexible individuals have members who can complete each other’s tasks. This is an obvious plus to a team because it greatly improves its adaptability and makes it less reliant on any single member.” So selecting members who themselves value flexibility, then cross training them to be able to do each other’s jobs, should lead to higher team performance over time.
Member Preferences Not every employee is a team player. Given the option, many employees will select themselves out of team participation. When people who would prefer to work alone are required to team up, there is a direct threat to the team’s morale and to individual member satisfaction. 46 This suggests that, when selecting team members, individual preferences should be considered as well as abilities, personalities, and skills. High-performing teams are likely to be composed of people who prefer working as part of a group.
Understanding work Teams
Work Design
Effective teams need to work together and take collective responsibility to complete significant tasks. They must be more than a “team in name only. Based on the terminology we introduced in Chapter 6. the work design category includes variables such as freedom and autonomy, the opportunity use different skills and talents (skill variety), the ability to complete a whole and identifiable task or product (task identity), and working on a task or project that has a substantial impact on other significance). The evidence indicates that these characteristics enhance member motivation and increase team effectiveness. These work-design characteristics motivate because they increase members sense of responsibility and ownership over the work and because they make the work more interesting to perform.
Understanding work Teams
Process
The final category related to team effectiveness is process variables. These include member commitment to a common purpose, establishment of specific team goals. team efficacy, a managed level of conflict, and minimizing social loafing.
Why are processes important to team effectiveness? One way to answer this question is to return to the topic of social loafing. We found that 1+1+1 doesn’t necessary add up to 3. In team tasks for which each member’s contribuible, there is a tendency for individuals to decrease their effort. Social loafing, in other words, illustrates a process loss as a result of using teams. But team processes should produce positive results. That is, teams should create outputs greater than the sum of their inputs. The development of creative alternatives by a diverse group would be one such instance. Exhibit 9-5 illustrates how group processes can have an impact on a group’s actual effectiveness. 50
Social loafing, for instance, represents negative synergy. The whole is less than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, research teams are often used in research laboratories because they can draw on the diverse skills of various individuals to produce more meaningful research as a team than could be generated by all of the researchers working independently. That is, they produce positive synergy. Their process gains exceed their process losses.
Understanding work Teams
Common Purpose Effective teams have a common and meaningful purpose that provides direction, momentum, and commitment for members. This purpose is a vision. It’s broader than specific goals.
Members of successful teams put a tremendous amount of time and effort into In leading Procter & Gamble’s discussing, shaping, and agreeing on a purpose that belongs to them both colleclaundry products team, Craig Bahner challenged team members and individually. This common purpose, when accepted by the team, becomes with the difficult goal of increasing the equivalent of what celestial navigation is to a ship captain-it provides direction the equivalent of what celestial navigation is to aspc U.S. market share for products that and guidance under any and all conditions. compete in a slow-growth industry.
Rising to the challenge, team Specific Goals Successful teams translate their common purpose into specific, members introduced a stream of measurable, and realistic performance goals. Just as we demonstrated in Chapter 6 new and improved products such as how goals lead individuals to higher performance, goals also energize teams. These Tide with Bleach, Tide Free, Tide
Understanding work Teams
Specific goals facilitate clear communication. They also help teams maintain their Kick, and Tide Rapid-Action Tablets. The team’s performance increased focus on getting results, Tide’s sales by 41 percent and Additionally, consistent with the research on individual goals, team goals should market share to 40 percent. be challenging. Difficult goals have been found to raise team performance on those criteria for which they’re set. So, for instance, goals for quantity tend to raise quantity goals for speed tend to raise speed, goals for accuracy raise accuracy, and so on.
What if anything, can management do to increase team efficacy Two possible options are helping the team to achieve small successes and providing skill training Small successes build team con fidence. As a team develops an increasingly stronger performance record, it also increases the col lective belief that future efforts will lead to success. In addition, managers should consider providing training to improve members’ technical and interpersonal skills. The greater the abilities of team members, the greater the likelihood that the team will develop confidence and the capabil ity to deliver on that confidence.
Understanding work Teams
Conflict Levels Conflict on a team isn’t necessarily bad. As we’ll elaborate in Chapter 14. teams that are completely void of conflict are likely to become apathetic and stagnant. So conflict can actu ally improve team effectiveness. But not all types of conflict. Relationship conflicts-those based on interpersonal incompatibilities, tension, and animosity toward others are almost always dys functional. However, on teams performing nonroutine activities, disagreements among members about task content (called task conflicts) is not detrimental. In fact, it is often beneficial because it lessens the likelihood of groupthink. Task conflicts stimulate discussion, promote critical assessment of problems and options, and can lead to better team decisions. So effective teams will be character ized by an appropriate level of conflict.
Social Loafing We learned in the previous chapter that individuals can hide inside a group. They can engage in social loafing and coast on the group’s effort because their individual contributions can’t be identified. Effective teams undermine this tendency by holding themselves accountable at both the individual and team level.
Successful teams make members individually and jointly accountable for the team’s purpose. goals, and approach. Members are clear on what they are responsible for individually and what they are responsible for jointly.
Understanding work Teams
Turning Individuals into Team Players
To this point, we’ve made a strong case for the value and growing popularity of teams. But many people are not inherently team players. They’re loners or people who want to be recognized for their individual achievements. There are also many organizations that have historically nurtured individual accomplishments. They have created competitive work environments in which only the strong survive. If these organizations adopt teams, what do they do about the selfish, “I’ve-got-to-look-outfor-me” employees that they’ve created? Finally, as we discussed in Chapter 3, countries differ in terms of how they rate on individualism and collectivism. Teams fit well with countries that score high on collectivism. But what if an organization wants to introduce teams into a work population that is made up largely of individuals bom and raised in an individualistic society like in the U.S. This limitation would obviously be just as true of Canadians, British, Australians, and others from individualistic societies, but different for Indians, where individuals are encouraged by societal institutions to be integrated into groups within organizations and society.
Understanding work Teams
The Challenge
The previous points are meant to dramatize that one substantial barrier to using work teams is individual resistance. An employee’s success is no longer defined in terms of individual performance. To perform well as team members, individuals must be able to communicate openly and honestly, to confront differences and resolve conflicts, and to sublimate personal goals for the good of the team For many employees, this is a difficult-sometimes impossible-task. The challenge of creating team players will be greatest when (1) the national culture is highly individualistic and (2) the teams are being introduced into an established organization that has historically valued individual achievement. This describes, for instance, what faced managers at AT&T, Ford, Motorola, and other large companies. These firms prospered by hiring and rewarding corporate stars, and they bred a competitive climate that encouraged individual achievement and recognition Employees in these types of firms can be jolted by this sudden shift to the importance of team play. A veteran emplovee of a large company, who had done well working alone, described the experience of joining a team: “I’m learning my lesson. I just had my first negative performance appraisal in 20 years
On the other hand, the challenge for management is less demanding when teams are introduced where employees have strong collectivist values such as in Japan or Mexico- or in new organizations that use teams as their initial form for structuring work. Saturn Corp., for instance, is an Amen can company owned by General Motors. The company was designed around teams from its inception Everyone at Saturn was hired with the knowledge that they would be working in teams. The ability to be a good team player was a basic hiring qualification that had to be met by all new employees
Understanding work Teams
Shaping Team Players
The following summarizes the primary options managers have for trying to turn individuals into team players.
Selection Some people already possess the interpersonal skills to be effective team players. When hiring team members, in addition to the technical skills required to fill the job, care should be taken to ensure that candidates can fulfill their team roles as well as the technical requirements.
Many job candidates don’t have team skills. This is especially true for those socialized around individual contributions. When faced with such candidates, managers basically have three options. The candidates can undergo training to make them into team players.” If this isn’t possible or doesn’t work, the other two options are to transfer the individual to another unit within the organization with out teams (if this possibility exists); or don’t hire the candidate. In established organizations that decide to redesign jobs around teams, it should be expected that some employees will resist being team players and may be untrainable. Unfortunately, such people typically become casualties of the team approach
Training On a more optimistic note, a large proportion of people raised on the importance of individual accomplishments can be trained to become team players. Training specialists conduct exercises that allow employees to experience the satisfaction that teamwork can provide. They typically offer workshops to help employees improve their problem-solving, communication, negotiation, conflict-management, and coaching skills. Employees also learn the five-stage group develop ment model described in Chapter 8. At Verizon, for example, trainers focus on how a team goes through various stages before it finally gels. And employees are reminded of the importance of patience-because teams take longer to make decisions than do employees acting alone.00
Emerson Electric’s Specialty Motor Division in Missouri, for instance, has achieved remarkable success in getting its 650-member workforce not only to accept, but to welcome, team training. Outside consultants were brought in to give workers practical skills for working in teams. After less than a year, employees were enthusiastically accepting the value of teamwork.
Understanding work Teams
Rewards The reward system needs to be reworked to encourage cooperative efforts rather than competitive ones. For instance, Hallmark Cards, Inc., added an annual bonus based on the achievement of team goals to its basic individual-incentive system. Trigon Blue Cross Blue Shield changed its system to reward an even split between individual goals and team-like behaviors.
Promotions, pay raises, and other forms of recognition should be given to individuals for how effective they are as a collaborative team member. This doesn’t mean individual contributions are ignored; rather, they are balanced with selfless contributions to the team. Examples of behaviors that should be rewarded include training new colleagues, sharing information with teammates, helping to resolve team conflicts, and mastering new skills that the team needs but in which it is deficient.
Last, don’t forget the intrinsic rewards that employees can receive from teamwork. Teams provide camaraderie. It’s exciting and satisfying to be an integral part of a successful team. The opportunity to engage in personal development and to help teammates grow can be a very satisfying and rewarding experience for employees.
Understanding work Teams
Teams and Quality Management
As discussed in Chapter 1, the issue of “improving quality” has garnered increased attention from man agement in recent years. In this section we want to demonstrate the important role that teams play in quality management (QM) programs.
The essence of QM is process improvement, and employee involvement is the linchpin of process improvement. In other words, QM requires management to give employees the encourage ment to share ideas and act on what they suggest. As one author put it. “None of the various quality management processes and techniques will catch on and be applied except in work teams. All such techniques and processes require high levels of communication and contact, response and adaptation, and coordination and sequencing. They require, in short, the environment that can be supplied only by superior work teams. 64
Teams provide the natural vehicle for employees to share ideas and to implement improvements. As stated by Gil Mosard, a QM specialist at Bocing: “When your measurement system tells you your process is out of control, you need teamwork for structured problem solving. Not everyone needs to know how to do all kinds of fancy control charts for performance tracking, but everybody does need to know where their process stands so they can judge if it is improving.”65 Examples from Ford Motor Co. and Amana Refrigeration, Inc., illustrate how teams are being used in QM programs. 66
Understanding work Teams
Ford began its QM efforts with teams as the primary organizing mechanism. “Because this business is so complex, you can’t make an impact on it without a team approach,” noted one Ford manager. In designing its quality problem-solving teams, Ford’s management identified five goals. The teams should (1) be small enough to be efficient and effective; (2) be properly trained in the skills their members will need; (3) be allocated enough time to work on the problems they plan to address: (4) be given the authority to resolve the problems and implement corrective action; and (5) each have a designated “champion,” whose job it is to help the team get around roadblocks that arise.
