Groups and teams

Question 1

What is a social group?

Answer 1

A social group is any collection of people who interact with each other and identify with one another.

Question 2

What is the definition of teamwork?

Answer 2

1. There is no generally accepted definition of ‘teamwork’.
2. ‘A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach, for which they hold themselves mutually accountable’ (Katzenbach and Smith 1993: 113).

Question 3

What is a group?

Answer 3

A group can interact for non-work-related tasks, such as friendship groups or religious groups.

Question 4

What is a team?

Answer 4

A team is a sub-type of social group that is formally assembled to work together to achieve a collective outcome or goal. e.g sports teams.

Question 5

Why is teamwork difficult?

Answer 5

• Genuine teamwork is hard to achieve.
• Personality clashes.
• Dysfunctional teams.
• Free riding.
• Conflict.
• Counter-productive.

Question 5

Why does teamwork matter?

Answer 5

• Key requirement for most jobs.
• Seen as central to organisational success.
• Core skills
• Brings benefits such as creativity and problem solving.

Question 5

What is the relation between teamwork and synergy?

Answer 5

Organisations create teams when they think teams will outperform individuals working alone (with their tasks allocated and outputs coordinated by a manager)

Question 6

Katzenbach & Smith (1993) teamwork is an effective way to…

Answer 6

• Improve performance
• Reduce production costs
• Speed up innovations
• Introduce new technologies
• Improve product quality
• Increase (functional)-flexibility
• Increase employee participation
• Achieve better industrial relations
• Identify and solve work-related problems
• Meet the challenge of global competition

Question 7

What are the types of teams?

Answer 7

• A self-managed team
• A cross-functional team
• A problem-solving team
• A virtual team

Question 8

What is a self-managed team?

What is a cross-functional team?

Answer 8

• A self-managed team is a group of workers who manage their own daily duties under little to no supervision.
• A cross-functional team is a group of workers from different units with various areas of expertise to work on certain projects.

Question 9

What is a problem-solving team?

What is a virtual team?

Answer 9

• A problem-solving team consists of a small group of workers who come together for a set mount of time to discuss and resolve specific issues.
• A virtual team is a group of members who are in different locations and work together through email, video-conferencing, instant messaging and other electronic media.

Question 10

What’s the relevence of teams across cultures?

Answer 10

• Teams differ according to the degree of autonomy they are given and the degree to which they are empowered to make decisions.
• Japanese team working is based on Taylorised and Fordist systems of work design, except workers are trained on more than one machine so they can multitask. Japanese teams can form quality control circles, where selected workers meet away from the production line to discuss and solve quality issues.
• Western approaches to teamwork tend to emphasise empowerment and autonomy and comprise highly-skilled employees from across different functions or units (cross-functional teams).
• What all teamwork types share in common is that the team is held collectively responsible for the team’s outputs.

Question 11

What are the 5 stages of team development (Tuckerman and Jensen 1965; 1997)

Answer 11

1. Forming - How do i fit in the group?
2. Storming - These are my goals. How are they different from yours?
3. Norming - Lets develop ways to work more closely.
4. Performing - Lets collaborate or complete in a friendly manner.
5. Adjourning - Here the group disbands and members on how the group is performed.

Question 12

What are the group stages?

Answer 12

• The sequence of stages can vary.
• Groups can pass through stages quickly or slowly.
• Some groups never enter the performing stage.
• Groups can get stuck at one stage.

Question 13

What are the strengths and weaknesses of Tuckman and Jensen’s theory?

Answer 13

+ Understand the process by which teams are formed.
+ Understand team development not always a smooth process.
+ Based on empirical research.

• Assumes a linear process to learn development.
• Boundaries between stages are often blurred.
• Do teams have to go through these stages?
• Cultural assumptions.

Question 14

What was Belbin’s role theory?

Answer 14

Based on a nine‐year study of management teams taking part in an executive management exercise, Meredith Belbin (1993) proposed that:

• People have personalities that make them predisposed to adopt particular team roles (patterns of behaving) when they work in groups.
• The roles that people prefer can be ascertained using personality profiles and team role questionnaires.
• A high-functioning team is ‘balanced’ in the sense that all roles are filled and all complement each other.
• Even small teams can function effectively if individuals can perform more than one role.
• Effective managers are those who know employee role types and can compose balanced teams.

Question 15

How does Belbin define a team role?

Answer 15

A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.

Question 16

What are Belbin’s team roles?

Answer 16

• Resource investigator
• Teamworker
• Coordinator
• Shaper
• Complete finisher
• Implementer
• Plant
• Specialist
• Monitor evaluator

Question 17

What are some key features of Belbin’s team role theory?

Answer 17

• Belbin’s team role theory recognises that each role has both strengths and weaknesses.
• No role type is assumed to be inherently better or more valuable.
• Belbin’s theory proposes that all roles need to be filled for a team to perform well.

Question 18

What are the criticisms of Belbin’s work?

Answer 18

• Broucek & Randell (1996) criticise the measure Belbin used for team performance as based on anecdotal rather than systematically tested and verified evidence.
• Furnham, Steele & Pendleton (1993) cast doubt on the validity of the personality questionnaire method used to map individuals on to team roles, questioning:
• Reliability (whether people give consistent answers at different times).
• Validity (whether it really measures what it claims to measure, i.e. personality types).
• Commensurability (whether the measure of personality actually ‘maps on to’ team roles).
• Assumes that people have fixed personalities and cannot adapt to different situations or develop over time (e.g. a ‘plant’ in a sporting team could be a ‘shaper’ in a work team).
• Cannot explain why some teams are high-performing teams despite having some roles apparently not filled.

Question 19

What are the teamwork dysfunctions?

Answer 19

• Some teams fail to deliver – get stuck in ‘Forming’ and ‘Storming’.
• Interpersonal problems- trust & conflict
• Leadership problems
• Some team ‘norms’ can be negative- Groupthink
• Free riders/social loafing
• Fake empowerment - teamwork = more control and overwork.

Question 20

Teams in name only?

Answer 20

• Teams require a degree of autonomy over what they do and how they do it. If teams are instructed on what each team member should do, how it should be done.
• Organisations sometimes use the term ‘team’ without adopting teamwork principles e.g McDonalds being referred to as ‘team members’ but actually working under Tayloristic worker conditions.

Question 21

Interpersonal dynamics: Why do teams lack trust?

Answer 21

• Conceal their weaknesses from one another.
• Hesitate to ask for help or provide constructive feedback.
• Don’t readily offer help to others.
• Waste time and energy managing their behaviours for effect.
• Hold grudges.

Question 22

What are the two types of interpersonal dynamics - conflict?

Answer 22

1. Personal-based conflict:
   - Rooted in anger, personal friction, personality clashes and tension.
   - Interferes with effort and attention to the task by creating preoccupation with reducing threats.
   - Interferes with effort and attention to the task by creating preoccupation with reducing threats, increasing power and building cohesion.
2. Issue-based conflict:
   - Depersonalised; Focused on merits of ideas, plans and projects.
   - Stimulates creativity and enhances decision quality through constructive criticism, consideration of different perspectives and stimulation of discussion.

Question 23

What is social loafing in teams?

Answer 23

• Reduction in motivation and effort when individuals work collectively compared with when they work individually or collectively.
• Tends to occur in larger teams.

Question 24

When is social loafing more likely to occur?

Answer 24

1. Individuals assume (correctly or incorrectly) that others (a) will not notice they are slacking, or (b) cannot measure individual contributions. This makes social loafing more likely in larger groups and groups with more complex and ambiguous tasks.
2. Individuals believe that others are also ‘loafing’ without experiencing any consequences.
3. Individuals believe (rightly or wrongly) that their contribution is not very important.
4. Individuals care less about achieving the group’s goals and/or careless about group acceptance than other members.
5. Individuals think they are less competent than others at their allocated tasks or find their tasks intrinsically unmotivating.
6. Individuals perceive themselves to have superior abilities in the group, but feel unable to influence group outcomes.

Question 25

What is free riding?

Answer 25

The term ‘free rider’ refers to the extreme cases where someone contributes nothing but still gets the benefits of the team’s work.

Question 26

What does groupthink mean and when does it occur?

Answer 26

• Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon in which people in a cohesive group go along with the group consensus rather than offering their own opinions.
• Groupthink occurs when:
• Norms for conforming in a homogeneous group become very strong.
• Members are highly concerned about maintaining unanimity.
• Groups fail to critically evaluate their options
• Make poorly reasoned decisions.
• An example of groupthink that is often cited is that of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.

Question 27

What are ways to minimise group think?

Answer 27

• Avoid isolating the group.
• Bring in outside experts.
• Critical evaluators / Devil’s advocate.
• Role is to question assumptions and uncontested information.
• Open climate.
• Leader invites and accepts divergent thinking.
• Avoid being directive.
• Strong leaders speak last or sometimes not at all.

Question 28

What is the critical perspective of teams?

Answer 28

• Teams are not a neutral technology of work design but a practice that creates, reproduces and maintains unequal social relations.
• The mainstream view creates an ‘idealised picture’ of teamwork by ignoring and dismissing behaviours and practices that ‘do not fit’.
• Organisations are pluralist systems where social relations and self-identities (ex. as ‘manager’ or ‘team member’) are constantly negotiated.

Question 29

What is the critical perspective of teamwork as surveillance and control?

Answer 29

• Teamwork maintains the basic logic of worker exploitation at the root of liberal capitalism:
• Shareholders and managers are concerned with profit maximisation (reduce costs)
• By participating in teamwork, workers actively consent to certain levels of effort and cost (control)
• By participating in teamwork, workers discipline themselves and one another (surveillance)
• Teamwork is a mechanism that enhances control, self-discipline and consent (Pollert 1996;McCabe and Black 1996)

Question 30

What are teams as an organisational fashion?

Answer 30

• In “The Rise of the New Groupthink” (The New York Times, Jan.13, 2012), author Susan Cain explains:
• “Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people’s skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.”
• “There’s a problem with the view that all work should be conducted by teams. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”