Chapter 8 - Team Dynamics Flashcards
What four factors make a team?
- All teams have a purpose that they accomplish, some goal or function
- Teams are held together by their interdependence
- Team members influence each other
- A team exists when members perceive themselves as a team
What are the three traits a team can be distinguished by?
- Team Permanence - how long will the team stay together
- Skill Diversity - how diverse of a skillset
- Authority Dispersion
What are some examples of different team structures?
- Departmental Teams
- Self-directed Teams
- Task Forces / Project Teams
Why do formal groups exist?
- Humans have a drive to bond socially
- Comforted by the presence of other people
- People feel that they can achieve personal goals better within a team
- Reinforces Self Image
What are some of the benefits of a team?
- Being able to look at a problem from multiple angles with multiple sources of experience
- More motivated to perform
- Better customer service
- Faster information transfer
What are the three motivating forces generated when working in a team?
- Employees have a drive to bond and fulfill the group’s goals
- High accountability to fellow team members
- Good performers in the team set a standard for everyone else
What are some challenges for teams?
Process Losses - resources expended towards maintaining the team
Brook’s Law - adding more people to a late software project only makes it more late
Social Loafing - problem that exists when people exert less effort when working teams than when working alone
What are some factors of social loafing?
- More prevalent in larger teams
- More prevalent when performance is hard to track and the team’s input is merged into a singular output
- Members with low conscientiousness and low agreeableness tend to loaf
- When jobs arent rich and interesting, people tend to loaf
- When people are unclear about the role or when they don’t see the impact of their work they tend to loaf
What are some ways to fix social loafing?
- Form smaller groups
- Measure individual performance
- Specialize tasks
- Increase Job Enrichment
- Select more motivated and team-oriented employees
What are some key features of an effective team
- Serve some organizational purpose
- Satisfaction and well being of its members is important
- Ability and motivation of the team members to remain together is strong
What are the three elements of team design
- Team Size
- Team Composition
- Task Characteristics
Factors related to Task Characteristics?
- Greater Task complexity requires more diverse skills and teamwork
- Teams tend to function better when there is low variability and high task analyzability
- Task interdependence, the extent to which employees must share materials, information, or expertise with others to perform their jobs
What are the three different levels of task interdependence?
- Pooled interdependence, employee or work unit shares machinery, support and other pooled resources
- Sequential interdependence, output of one is the input of another
- Reciprocal interdependence, work output is exchanged back and forth (higher level of interdependence)
Who could act as a buffer due to higher task interdependence requiring more intense coordination?
Supervisors
Challenges of Team Diversity
- More diverse teams take more time to become high-performers
- More diverse teams take more time to become well-connected
- Hypothetical divide lines based on gender, ethnicity, etc. could split the group into subgroups which would further divide the team
