Team Dynamics

Teams have become more than a way of life in organizations: they have become a necessity for organizations that need to move quickly. Though teams have been around forever, the reality of the rapidly changing business environment, paired with the complexity of the problems they face, doesn't allow "business as usual." Organizations in almost every industry were using some type of teams in the 1970s, but the ever-increasing competition, including global markets, greatly increased the speed with which organizations began using teams as a competitive strategy and tactic.

Why Use Teams?

Believe it or not, before teams became ubiquitous, organizational problems were handled in a primarily linear fashion according to the hierarchical organization chart. A problem would arise, and a department would begin exploring the issue. Members of that department would come to some sort of conclusion, and would forward to another department, and so on. Problems would take forever to resolve because each additional department would advocate for some other solution, and months would go by even to get each department to form an initial position on the problem.

Even when a solution was finally agreed upon, sending out the proposed solution to various departments would result in efforts that were not synchronized. One department would jump forward, another would lag, and the whole effort might end up a mess.

Teamwork brought a range of perspective to the table from the very beginning, allowing for a a synchronized solution in implementation. When teams are successful, they are powerful.

The paradox of teams is that they are hard work. Teams must be led and managed, and participants have to have clear and unambiguous common goals, or work will quickly fall apart. Everyone has worked on teams that were failures. In those cases, it was not the construct called teams that failed; the members of the team failed. Failure in teams can always be avoided through effective leadership.

Definitions

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approaches for which they hold themselves mutually accountable (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993). Virtual teams are those that do their work from different locations.

The type of team used, whether virtual or physical, is purely a function of the organization's dispersion—and getting the right people at the table to perform the work or realize the purpose. Any team requires a strong leader and facilitator to keep work progressing; virtual teams require an even higher degree of facilitation given the geographic dispersion and the challenges of using meeting technology. There are times when the team model is used with people who are in the organization as well as others who are not in the organization—from subsidiaries, vendors, or outside experts. Again, facilitation is key to successful teams.

There are several main purposes for teamwork:

  1. The first and overriding purpose is to bring complementary skills together to work on a common problem, project, or to deliver a product or service. Complementary skills provide the opportunity for synergy not otherwise available by individuals working alone, or even in succession.
  2. The second purpose, related to the first, is to attain much better process results than any one individual could attain (e.g., decision making and problem solving). There are numerous examples of this in the teams literature.
  3. The third purpose is to deliver better performance numbers than individuals could deliver (e.g., productivity, cycle time, quality).
  4. The fourth is to develop the team members more rapidly than they might otherwise have been developed. Cross-training of all team members is a frequently used tool, but; team members will also benefit from "osmosis training"—in other words, simply by working side by side with team members having different skills and knowledge, an individual will learn and grow.
  5. A fifth purpose is to provide social needs in an organization. This is especially important in organizations where the work itself may not be very motivating and fulfilling.
  6. A sixth purpose, which surfaced only a few years ago, is to provide organizational leadership as companies "de-layer" their organizations and operate with many fewer middle managers. Teams often take on many heretofore managerial roles.

At the end of the day, the real purpose of teams is shown in the graphic below: bringing synergistic experts together to solve problems can help the organization grow another competitive advantage—deepening organizational capacity and efficiency.

Diagram showing how teams have a competitive advantage.
Teams and Competitive Advantage

What Do Teams Do?

There are thousands of types of teams, and their purposes can be placed into three categories, which are discussed below.

Teams That Recommend Things

How many times have you heard managers say , "Let's put a team together to explore the problem!" The time frame of these teams is usually short, unless it's a major project. There is a specific problem being explored, so the team will typically work for a finite time span. These teams are called task forces, project teams, continuous improvement (CI) teams, audit teams, safety teams, and lean manufacturing teams, among others. America's response to Japan's quality superiority in the 1970s was been to use CI teams for quality, speed, and productivity. The results from these early teams helped managers see the value of teams for numerous other purposes.

Teams That Make or Do Things

These teams are more or less a permanent part of the organization's structure. The team is usually comprised of front-line workers who design things (e.g., automobiles, software), make a product, or deliver a service. Most teams that make or do things are longer term in nature than those whose goal is a recommendation. For instance, automobile companies often assemble design teams who may be together for two to three years designing a new car. The US auto industry used to take four or five years to design a new car, but the Japanese showed us how it could be done in much less time by using cross-functional teams. 

Resources

Teams That Run Things

This type of team is usually at the top of a company (including board members), business unit, facility, or even a function or department. They may be called the Leadership Team, C-Suite Team, CEO's Team, Top Team, Plant Manager's Team, etc. Regardless of its name, this team runs the organization over which it is responsible and accountable. While this type of team is seen far less often than other types, the impact of the decisions they are making are quite large.

Making Teams Successful

The rise of virtual teams in the last 15 or 20 years has led to much research on what makes teams successful face to face, so that specific attention could be paid to fostering those traits even when the team is virtual. 

Research has concluded that the most successful teams in the world display the following best practices .

Trust

Like in any human relationship, trust must be present, but it cannot be expected that trust will be present when a team is first formed. Quite often, team members have not had the opportunity to work together, and trust cannot be assumed. Instead, the team leadership must purposefully work to build trust. Trust can be fostered by the establishment of a commonality of purpose. The more the team's work can be articulated—and the role each person will play in that work clarified—the stronger can be trust. 

Far more important, however, is clarification of the expectations team members have for each other on their work on a team. Many team failures can be traced to an expectation one person had that others didn't meet. Because expectations weren't met, the person with the expectation feels betrayed, and trust isn't present. Expert team leads do everything they can up front to find out what expectations are in people's head tacitly, and extract those out explicitly so that everyone can see and respond to them. So, best practice is to spend tremendous amounts of time up front on a team establishing common "team rules"—behavioral expectations—and having every team member agree to them, while also articulating very specifically what the goals of the team are so everyone feels completely informed as to what the team's work is.

Clear Communications Plan

Not all members of the team will be present for all conversations; in fact, one benefit of having teams is that different specialists will work on different aspects of the problem. But, each team's work has to be communicated to the rest of the team so that everyone knows where the project is, where bottlenecks may be occurring, and what work must be completed next. When team members aren't fully informed where the work is, they are more likely to feel like their contribution is not valued, and they will contribute less.

Recognition of Progress and Accomplishments

Leaders that empower teams must make sure the team is set up for success, that expectations are clear and attainable, and that the work of the team will be valued by the organization. A way to do this is to ensure that the team receives specific recognition for their successes, and that they get full credit for their work.

Planning

To make a team effective, once the goals of the team are clearly articulated, the team should take time to develop a plan up front. Spending more time developing a plan that ensures the team will finish its work on time, including building in contingencies, and will make sure that the team's work doesn't have to all happen at once. We've all been on teams that inevitably had to scramble at the very end to finish on time; that can be avoided as much as possible with careful planning.

Active Facilitation

No meeting should be held without careful statement of the work that needs to be accomplished during that meeting: what decisions must be made, what work is next to be focused on, what work should be reported on. In addition, facilitators must know when to move the team forward, when to stop and address issues that arise (such as team behavior not meeting stated expectations). The facilitator, usually the team leader, makes or breaks the progress of the team.

Enforce Accountability

Team members must keep each other accountable to the work, given team expectations, given the timeline, and given each person's area of expertise. 

Clear Decision Making Structure

Teams need to be able to make decisions; they must be given the authority and trust to make decisions that the organization will seriously consider and implement. How decisions are made should be clearly articulated. Teams that decide they are going to get consensus for every decision may be dooming themselves for failure. 

Larson and LaFasto (1989) found several characteristics of effective teams, several of which touch upon the importance of a clear decision making structure:

  • Establish urgency, performance standards and direction.
  • Select members for skill and skill potential, not personality.
  • Pay particular attention to first meetings and actions.
  • Set some clear rules for behavior.
  • Set and seize upon a few immediate performance oriented tasks and goals.
  • Challenge the team regularly with fresh facts and information.
  • Spend lots of time together.
  • Exploit the power of positive feedback, recognition, and reward.

Team Roles

The subject of team roles is important because it addresses required human behaviors for teams to reach the performing stage of team development. In this context, the word roles refers to the behaviors of specific team members. What can be confusing about team roles is that they may be constantly in flux in terms of which team member(s) plays which role(s).

In this learning topic, team roles will be divided into two categories: task roles and team maintenance roles (also called relationship roles). Task roles are the behaviors necessary to guide the team in it use of information and resolving problems. Team maintenance roles are the behaviors that help the team interact with each other. Using primarily the taxonomy of Gatewood, Taylor, and Ferrell (1995), each role is described in the following section. 

The final topic addressed, after task roles and relationship roles, is that of the facilitator. Facilitators specialize in keeping communication flowing and a process progressing. It is an important concept for students to understand because in the context of teamwork, a facilitator is able to identify the roles not being filled and find a way for the team to fill them.

Task Roles

  • Initiator—Initiating behavior refers to getting a team started on a project or an individual team work session. Its importance is that the role focuses the team and minimizes off-topic discussions.
  • Information Provider—This role represents the act of giving required information to the team. It is a role that would be likely to rotate often among the members, especially in cross-functional teams where you have a variety of experts whose knowledge would be essential at different times during the team project.
  • Information Seeker—This role identifies the need for someone to ask team members for information or opinions. People who fill this role tend to be more extroverted.
  • Summarizer—People filling this role are adept at providing updates on where the team stands in terms of completing the project. A summarizer may also help close a meeting by summing up the progress for an individual team session or during a lapse in progress for the team.
  • Elaborator—An elaborator is able to contribute more information to something supplied by an information provider. Perhaps it is a clarification or something new.
  • Consensus Taker—Sometimes teams will hit a point of disagreement on how to deal with a project issue. Consensus takers will try to clarify where each team member stands on the issue in question to assess the degree of disagreement.

A number of different labels have been created for task roles over the years. The roles described here are commonly used, although different terms may be created by different researchers. The point to remember is that a team needs task roles to be filled. The filling of a role does not have to be assigned or fixed on one person; it can rotate among team members as the situation changes.

Team Maintenance Role

Team maintenance roles serve the function of keeping the team's interactions constructive and satisfying. Once again, the team member who performs a role may rotate as the team progresses on its assigned task. Five team maintenance roles will be described here. Some of the roles overlap or sound very similar, so it is possible to combine some of the roles. In some teams, a single member may play several roles.

  • Encourager—The encourager role is to compliment team members on their contributions and to call on the quieter team members and ask for their input. If this role isn't filled in a team, some team members will mentally disengage from the team .
  • Harmonizer—This role requires a person who is good at releasing tension within a team. Harmonizers help the team deal with conflict. It is an especially important role during the storming stage of team development (discussed below).
  • Standards Monitor—This role requires a person to hold the team to the rules, processes, and outcomes the team agreed to in the early stages of their task.
  • Gatekeeper—This role can overlap with the encourager role, because the gatekeeper tries to ensure all team members have a chance to speak. Many teams will have one or more dominant personalities and the gatekeeper makes sure that the more passive team members get to have input.
  • Tension Reliever—This role overlaps with the harmonizer but is focused on suggesting breaks or telling a quick joke to relieve tension.

Team maintenance roles are just as important as the task roles because teams are about people, and effective teams usually like and respect each other with time. If the team maintenance roles are not filled by the team members, the team will likely never make it out of the storming stage of team development.

Facilitators

In the context of teams, a facilitator is a person who keeps the communication open and flowing and assists the team with their processes. A good team facilitator is familiar with all of the task roles and team maintenance roles required in a team. Facilitators who are from within the company can even fill the role of information provider, a role most facilitators do not fill. 

Understanding the various team roles is knowledge that can make a person stand out when they are assigned to a team because that person can influence or shape the way the team functions. The negative side to facilitation is that a person may use it to justify their overly controlling participation in the team, but this problem generally has to be resolved in the storming stage of team development, or the team will fall apart and the task will fail.

Stages of Team Development

No discussion of teams would be complete without the classic stages of team development. Please take a minute to reflect on one of your most recent experiences as a new team was initiated. What went on early in the team? What were the feelings? What was expressed? Not Expressed? What were the apparent stages your team went through? Then, compare these experiences with the model below.

From academic research and verified in (probably) thousands of business applications, there are quite predictable stages of team development. This chart; based on the work Tuckman and Jensen shows the stages with a short explanation of each stage follows.

Five Stages of Team Development

  • Forming—The getting -acquainted period. Rules, goal, roles, decision methods, and meeting times are early topics for discussion.
  • Storming—Conflicts begin to arise as members find they have differing opinions on a number of team -related topics. Often, struggles for position and dominance occur at this stage.
  • Norming—The team begins to settle in on the objectives. The roles and operational procedures are getting clear , allowing the team to begin its real work.
  • Performing—Much of the team "stuff" is out of the way, and the team has begun to improve the working relationships, collect information, make decisions, and possibly have a few small wins. Depending in the reason for the team, the team may be in this stage for a considerable length of time (e. g ., a large project, a product design team, or a service/manufacturing team).
  • Adjourning—This stage is an opportunity to wrap up the team's work and celebrate the results. Management should ensure proper and visible recognition of the team's achievements.

The team leadership must facilitate the team through these stages: It is easy for a team to get stuck in the dysfunction of the storming phase without ever working through to the further phases. Failure to address conflict, for example, will result in people being disillusioned and quitting the team.

References

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