Lecture 2 Flashcards
Why study teams?
Work is increasingly structured in teams.
Teams resemble how we will probably work in an organization in the future.
Teams are the most relevant organizational unit for employees.
Culture often resides at the team level.
What are teams?
Small number of people with complementary skills working together to achieve common goals with collective accountability.
On what ways do groups differ from teams?
- Purpose
- Interdependence
- Task orientation
- Formal structure
- Familiarity
Groups vs teams on task orientation
Group: no coordination of tasks per se
Team: high coordination to attain goals
Groups vs teams on purpose
Group: can exist as a matter of fact; individual
Team: formed for a reason; collective; time-based
Groups vs teams on interdependence
Group: low/variable
Team: high
Groups vs teams on formal structure
Group: low/more informal
Team: high, formal roles and duties
Groups vs teams on familiarity
Group: low/variable; personal or no knowledge/ interaction
Team: high; aware of/ interact with people of work
Team design components
- Goal clarity
- Diversity/ composition
- Task structure
- Functioning
- Performance norms
Goal clarity
A component of team design.
How well does the team understand its goal?
How realistic-challenging are the team’s goals?
How is progress monitored?
How is feedback organized?
Task structure
A component of team design.
Task coordination:
- How do we make individual tasks fit together?
- Who coordinates team tasks?
- Important: leadership
o Traditional teams or agile teams
Task regulation:
- The degree to which members can control their own task behaviour (free from external pressures or not?)
- Who is responsible for ensuring team members perform their tasks?
- Leader-regulation, coworker regulation or self-regulation?
- Easier for independent people.
Team functioning
A component of team design.
You can distinguish how much you focus on the task at hand versus the relationship orientation (getting to know each other further than the task).
Task oriented (TO) vs relationship oriented (RO)
- Goal directed distanced: high TO, low RO
- Goal directed involved: high TO, high RO
- Undirected distanced: low TO, low RO
- Undirected involved: low TO, high RO
Performance norms
A component of team design.
How should we perform our tasks?
What levels of performance are acceptable?
Diversity/composition of a team
4 ways:
- Surface-level relationship oriented
- Surface-level task oriented
- Deep-level relationship oriented
- Deep-level task oriented
Surface-level relationship oriented
- Gender
- Age
- Ethnicity
- Religion
Surface-level task oriented
- Education
- Org. tenure
- Department
- Qualifications
Deep-level relationship oriented
- Personality
- Attitudes
- Values
- Sexual identity
Deep-level task oriented
- Task knowledge
- Experience
- Cognitive ability
- Org. knowledge
Team development and learning
Teams are important in organizations nowadays and they need to learn in order to improve the organizational culture and effectiveness.
Bruce Tuckman’s group development model (1960s)
This is how it should be according to Tuckman.
Groups go through linear developmental stages according to this model, but typically groups don’t go through all these stages in such a clear manner.
There are only 2 articles; not very well empirically validated, but intuitively attractive.
Forming => storming => norming => performing => adjourning
Forming stage of the group development model
Team acquaints and establishes ground rules. Formalities are preserved and members are treated as strangers.
Storming stage of the group development model
Members start to communicate their feelings but still view themselves as individuals rather than part of the team. They resist control by group leaders and show hostility.
Norming stage of the group development model
People feel part of the team and realize that they can achieve work if they accept other viewpoints.
Performing stage of the group development model
The team works in an open and trusting atmosphere where flexibility is the key and hierarchy is of little importance.
Adjourning stage of the group development model
The team conducts an assessment of the year and implements a plan for transitioning roles and recognizing members’ contributions.
Susan Wheelan’s Integrative Model of Group Development (1990s)
Teams can go to a stage, then go back to another one, skip one, etc. It’s very dynamic.
But, teams go through different/recursive development stages.
Not all teams go through stages in a similar manner or reach all stages.
In developing across stages, three dimensions change.
This model is strongly theorized & empirically validated; over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles.
What are the three dimensions that change according to the Integrative Model of Group Development?
- Task orientation
- How focused everyone is on getting things done
- Socio-emotional orientation
- The balance between making money and taking care of people
- Leadership style (directive/participative)
- How the boss leads
The stages of the Integrative Model of Group Development
The stages are roughly the stages of Tuckman, but then labelled by Wheelan.
- Dependency & inclusion
- Counterdependency & fight
- Trust & structure
- Work & productivity
- Adjourn
Typical to challenge leadership, have misunderstandings, go back to previous stages
Dependency & inclusion of the Integrative Model of Group Development
Task focus: teams look up to leader to allocate tasks
Socio-emotional: personal safety & acceptance
Leader: directive
Counter dependency and fight of the Integrative Model of Group Development
Task focus: clarifying goals
Socio-emotional: value conflict and resolution
Leader: leader position is challenged
Trust and structure of the Integrative Model of Group Development
Task focus: building trust and structure
Socio-emotional: cohesion and trust
Leader: consultive/coach
Work and productivity of the Integrative Model of Group Development
Task focus: high performance
Socio-emotional: cooperation
Leader: delegating/distributed
Adjourning of the Integrative Model of Group Development
Task focus: evaluation
Socio-emotional: solidarity
Leader: facilitates termination
If teams succeed to advance to later stages of development they…
- have more surviving patients in intensive care.
- have a greater ability to adapt to agile ways of working in health care and engineering.
- have members with higher levels of work satisfaction and lower levels of work exhaustion in manufacturing.
- have more satisfied customers and managers in the service industry.
- have students performing better on tests in schools.
Why is team learning important in relation to OD?
Teams are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations.
Organizations rely on teams that can learn in order to be effective.
Organizations depend on the learning capacity of teams in order to be competitive.
When teams do not learn, it is likely an organization will not be able to adapt to environmental changes.
Integrating team learning terminology
Team learning behaviors: teams work by sharing ideas and learning from others; intrateam learning.
Boundary spanning: asking help from people from outside of your team.
Emergent states: from individual to collective…
- Goal orientation
- Psychological safety
- Team efficacy
- Cohesion
Team learning outcomes: shifts in…
- Collective knowledge
- Team performance
- Shared Mental Models
- Transactive Memory Systems
Shared Mental Models vs Transactive Memory Systems
Shared Mental Models
- Team members’ shared, organized understanding and mental representation of knowledge about key elements of the team’s task (what we know).
- Overlapping knowledge shared by entire team - if somebody leaves, you still know the same.
Versus
Transactive Memory Systems
- Team-level shared system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information that is distributed across group members (who know what).
- Team member awareness of what information is shared - if somebody leaves or comes in => gap in trasactive memory system.
What do teams learn and when according to the Integrative Model of Group Development and the multi-level model of team compilation?
Dependency & Inclusion → Team formation
- Interpersonal communications; socialization, formation of climate; sharing / listening.
- There is learning, but it’s more about the climate.
Counterdependency & fight → Task compilation
- Negotiating tasks, goals, needs, performance dynamics; co-construction/ constructive conflict.
- It’s about how to perform as a group.
Trust & Structure → Role compilation
- Shared understanding interconnection between roles and tasks coordination, creation of routine and structure of work processes.
Work & Productivity → Team compilation
- Further development of role network, team-level regulation of adaptation to change, error, feedback, reflection.
- It becomes looping because of the feedback. You can be much more productive in this stage.
A dynamic model of team learning over time
Learning trigger => transition => action
It is about learning triggers. They explain why learning happens in the first place.
Team members get external knowledge from the outside world on an individual level and share this with their team after a learning trigger.
Collective knowledge over time.
Sensitive to: recognition of learning triggers, decompose exisiting knowledge, try to emerge knowledge into that.
E.g., if there is a need for reorganization, this could be a trigger to start learning about new things in the team.
Team knowledge process
- Cognition
- Action
- Reflection
Variation/disruption in team learning episodes is caused when…?
New information is complex (episodes take longer).
Learning trigger is in conflict with existing collective knowledge.
Time pressures are imposed on the learning process.
Content of what needs learning is susceptible to change.
External resources that facilitate learning change.
Members enter or exit the team (composition).
- Knowledge might be gone and the tasks within the teams need to be reorganized.
What is diversity?
Individual-level: Feeling or being different as an individual relative to the rest
Group-level: The composition of teams (team composition)
System-level: Differences between people in the organization
The group-level is the most important.
Diversity is a characteristic of group composition that reflects the degree to which there are objective or subjective differences between individuals in the group on any attribute.
What are the possible positive outcomes from team diversity on team effectiveness?
- Creative ideas
- Better decision-making
- Innovation
- Improved performance
- Flexibility & Open-mindedness
What are the possible negative outcomes from team diversity on team effectiveness?
- Miscommunication
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Exclusion
- Productivity loss
- Worse performance
Meta-analyses on the effects of team diversity on team effectiveness
A “main effects” approach is not useful to understand the relation between team diversity and effectiveness.
Just looking at diversity and effectiveness doesn’t show anything because there are a lot of opposing findings.
What should you focus on when looking at the effects of team diversity on team effectiveness?
“When” the team conditions are met, because that is a moderator of the effect of team diversity on team effectiveness.
The “how” of team processes is the mediator.
What different types of diversity are there?
Demographic diversity = Surface-level (visible)
- Race
- Gender
- Nationality
- Age
Functional diversity = Deep-level (invisible)
- Education
- Function level
- Profession
- Experience
- Expertise
- Competencies
- E.g., this person likes to present, this person likes to make powerpoint slides, etc.
… and beyond = Deep-level (invisible)
- Emotions
- Interests
- Values
- Personality
Does the type of team diversity determine its effectiveness?
The general assumption in the literature is that if you have functional diversity, teams are the most effective.
But, research showed:
- The impact of diversity on in-team outcomes is not moderated by how functional or task-oriented the type of diversity is.
- In principle all types of diversity in teams can lead to positive and/or negative team outcomes.
- But, if you have functional diversity, teams are most effective – it is directly connected to the task we are doing.
So, does the type of team diversity determine its effectiveness? No, it depends on the environment.
Recommendations on diversity
Do not automatically assume that demographic diversity has a negative impact and functional diversity a positive impact on team effectiveness.
Broaden your horizon in thinking about diversity; look beneath the surface and investigate deep-level diversity with respect to personality, values etc. in interaction with context.
Categorization-Elaboration Model
Integrated theory on team diversity
Team diversity can lead to social categorization or team elaboration.
Team elaboration (information/decision-making) is the positive side of team diversity, which leads to positive outcomes: team effectiveness.
Social categorization is the negative side of team diversity, which leads to negative outcomes:
- Polarization
- Miscommunication
- Prejudice
- Discrimination
Social categorization: (pessimistic) perspective
Roots in social identity theory
Social categorization: differentiation team members in “us” and “them” on the basis of ingroup/similarity and outgroup/dissimilarity causing subgroup formation.
- E.g., research where in a summer camp the children were randomly divided in two groups (red and blue). At the end of the camp they asked how well they liked each other, and they didn’t really like the other team, even though the categorization was totally random.
IF subgroup formation leads to activation of negative stereotypes, prejudice, bias, discrimination, ostracism, exclusion etc, this in turn has negative consequences for team functioning (so not by definition).
Related theories on interpersonal relations in organizations
- Similarity-Attraction Hypothesis
- ASA-Framework
- “Who fits with the team?” you tend to look for people that are similar to yourself.
Information/elaboration: (optimistic) perspective
Focuses on how diverse information, experiences, and knowledge contribute to team effectiveness when shared and integrated.
“Team diversity can be associated with various perspectives in information, knowledge, beliefs, experiences and this type of diversity can enhance team effectiveness”
- Needed: all the types of expertise, knowledge etc. needs to be shared (team elaboration).
If you want team diversity to work, you need to think about team elaboration processes.
Team elaboration actions
- Sharing knowledge
- Critical reflection
- Constructive conflict
- Feedback & discussion
- Integration
Homogonous teams
Homogonous team outcomes can be very biased.
Bias in decision-making:
- Groupthink
o A homogonous team derives to a conclusion relatively fast, but it is often the wrong conclusion. - Social loafing
- Dominant leader
- Diffusion of responsibility
- Abilene Paradox
Abilene paradox
Everyone goes to dinner 1,5 hours aways, because everyone thought the others would want it and went along instead of challenging this.
The group decides something that is the oposite of the preferences of most in the group.
How do we operationalize diversity?
Dispersion vs. faultlines
Dispersion
Index to measure the extent to which team members differ from each other.
You can calculate this, it’s mathematical.
It can be based on several categories.
Presumes that different types of diversity exist alongside each other.
This simplifies things quite a bit, but you don’t know about the diversity within the members of the team.
Blau index
- (You don’t have to calculate it but need to know the basics of how it works and what it does.)
- It is not always about dichotomous variables.
E.g.,:
- Gender 0.5
- Ethnicity: 0.5
Faultlines
Combinations of different forms of diversity can correlate with each other, causing more or less subgroup formation. Subgroups might have prejudice against each other.
Presumes that different types of diversity can interact with each other.
Weak faultlines overlap with intersectionality.
None of these things are inherently bad etc.,
Objective measures vs subjective measures
Objective measures:
- Determine composition of the group with numeric index.
- (Blau, faultline, or other index)
Subjective measures:
- The perception of group members on how different people are on a certain attribute.
- Self-report: ask group members to what extend they perceive that group members differ from each other on a diversity dimension.
In sum: team diversity => effectiveness?
There is no direct relationship between team diversity and team effectiveness;
- Focus on understanding team processes (explanations) and circumstances (context).
In principle, all types of diversity can help or hinder team effectiveness.
An integration of theories on social categorization and information/decision-making reveals that:
- Elaboration in diverse teams can reap benefit from differences.
- Subgroup formation can hinder team functioning (if it leads to stereotyping etc).
There are many team diversity measures
- Integrating multiple methods is a good idea.
Asch experiment
A group of people are shown a line and three options, they have to answer which line is just as big as the first line. The right answer was very obvious. There is only one participant, everyone else will give the wrong answer, and they look whether the participant also gives the wrong answer or deviates to give the right answer.
Explain conformity
Group norms: beliefs about how group members should act within the group
37% of Asch’s participants yielded to conformity pressures.
Individuals conform to group norms to…
- …reduce uncertainty about how to behave (informational influence).
- …fit in, obtain approval from others, or avoid punishment and social isolation (normative influence).
Deviance and dissent
Deviance: the violation of group norms
- Two types:
o Negative: individuals can fail to live up to important group norms or reject group norms.
o Positive: individuals can deviate by contributing more to the group than the average group member.
Dissent: the expression of disagreement with group norms, group action, or a group decision.
What determines whether behaviour is considered as deviant?
The salience of the norm in the context
- E.g., dancing at the disco – conform vs dancing at the office – deviant
Motives for deviance and dissent
- Disengagement, disloyalty, or disrespect
- Loyalty and concern for the group
- Moral rebellion—when personal moral convictions take precedence over group norms
- Desire to express difference, individuality/ uniqueness
- Tangible rewards and instrumental gain
Motive 1 (disengagement, disloyalty, or disrespect) & 2 (loyalty and concern for the group):
Loyalty to the group as a motive to conform ánd to deviate?
Conformity to group norms
- Those who are loyal to the group conform more.
- The higher identified with the group, the more conformity.
Deviance from group norms
- Those who are loyal to the group deviate more.
- The higher identified, the more deviance.
Normative Conflict Model of Dissent
Related to motives 1 & 2:
- Disengagement, disloyalty, or disrespect
- Loyalty and concern for the group
A graph with on the x-axis identification with group (GI) and on the y-axis normative conflict (NC).
The graph contains:
- High NC, low GI: disloyal, disrespect (motive 1)
- High NC, high GI: deviance out of group loyalty (motive 2)
- Low NC, low GI: disengage: passive nonconformity (motive 1)
- Low NC, high GI: loyal conformity
Disloyal, disrespect on the Normative Conflict Model of Dissent
Motive 1
Strong normative conflict and low identification with group.
Opposes rules out of dislike or disrespect for the group.
Deviance out of group loyalty on the Normative Conflict Model of Dissent
Motive 2
Strong normative conflict and high identification with group.
Breaks rules to help the group improve.
Also called uneasy conformity (=> Asch)
Disengage: passive nonconformity on the Normative Conflict Model of Dissent
Motive 1
Weak normative conflict and low identification with group.
Quietly ignores rules, not invested in the group.
Loyal conformity on the Normative Conflict Model of Dissent
Weak normative conflict and high identification with group.
Follows rules, aligns with group values.
Motive 3: Moral rebellion
Moral rebels: individuals who give priority to following personal convictions over group norms when individual and group norms clash.
Those who dissent by expressing strong moral convictions that deviate from group norms are less likely to be swayed by group pressure.
Motive 4: Desire to express difference, individuality, and uniqueness
Fundamental need for uniqueness:
- Clarifying their self-concept
- Communication to others who they are
Especially pronounced when people attribute the normative consensus to obedience.
Motive 5: Tangible rewards and instrumental gain
Deviance and dissent result in gains
- Fraud, stealing, selling obscure products (immoral behaviour)
- Impostorism
Impostorism
Individuals breaking group norms by passing themselves off as genuine group members even though they do not meet key criteria for group membership
Why groups reject deviance and dissent
Groups force individuals to conform to resolve threats to:
- Group positivity
- Group cohesion
- Group distinctiveness
- Group locomotion
- Self-image of other group members
Black sheep phenomenon: we tend to punish in-group members harder, because it harms our identity.
What is the value of dissent and deviance?
Dissent:
- Improves decision-making.
- Enhances creativity and innovation.
Deviance:
- Affirms group values, clarifies norms, how they are distinct from other groups.
- Draws attention to alternative forms of behaviour and thereby allows for culture change.
When are dissenters and deviants tolerated?
First time offender or ongoing deviant?
- Frist time is tolerated more
Severity of action and harm to the group.
- The more severe the less tolerated
Power position of the dissenter/deviant.
- New people that do this will be tolerated less
Prototypicality of the dissenter/deviant.
Group tenure of the dissenter/deviant.
Stage of group formation.
- If the group exists for quite some time already, there is more room for people to be deviant compared to earlier stages of team development.
Also depends on national culture.
- In the Netherlands it’s more expected of people to speak out then in other countries.
What do teams go through?
Teams go through different development stages in terms of socio-emotional, task, and leadership focus.
Is team development the same as team learning?
No, team development is not the same as team learning but both are dynamically related.
True or false: more team diversity automatically results in higher performance
False.
More team diversity does not automatically result in higher performance.
True or false: loyal organization/team members can engage in dissent behaviour and disloyal organization/team members can engage in deviant behaviour.
Both are true.
Both disloyal, and loyal organization/team members can engage in dissent and deviant behaviour for different reasons. If tolerated by the group it can be a vehicle for culture change from the bottom-up.
