Psychology of teams Flashcards
5 characteristics of a team
- Exist to achieve a shared goal
- Team members are Interdependent: Need one another to achieve the goal
- Bounded through membership and relatively stable over time.
- Members have the authority to manage their own work and internal processes.
- Operate in a larger context: organisation, program, class, network, society
What defines good “team performance”?
- Completing the task
- Making a good decision, coming up with a new ides, delivering relevant outputs to managers or other stakeholders - Maintaining social relations
- At the end of the projects, are team members willing to work together again in the future? - Individual benefit
- Are group members happy with their own contribution and their own success with the project?
Trends that make teams more important?
- Increased need to make decisions quickly
- Increasing amount and complexity of information and types of tasks
- Globalisation
- Increased accountability of decisions
- Focus on creativity and innovation
Benefits of teams to group decisions
- Pooling of resources, skills, abilities
- Specialisation of labour
- Multiple different perspectives on an issue
- Decisions tend to be more easily accepted by others
Negatives of group decisions
- Potential waste of time - groups tend to be less efficient than individuals
- Group conflict
- Some members over-contribute while others under-contribute
Are groups more effective than individuals?
Actual Productivity equation
On average, teams make better decisions than most individuals, but perform worse than the best individual in the group.
AP = PP + S - Process Losses
S - Synergy
P - Process Losses
To achieve optimal team performance, “process losses” must be reduced
2 sources of process loss in groups
- Coordination losses: Occur due to time and effort spent trying to divide up tasks between group members and reintegrating products of multiple individuals.
E.g Duplication of effort, putting pieces of project together - Communication losses: Occur due to difficulty in communicating between group members, and the time and effort spent convincing and persuading others of good solutions
E.g. Miscommunication, time spent debating an issue.
When are teams most effective?
In judgement and creative tasks.
Benefits of group brainstorming
- Provide different perspectives on an issue
- Group members can cognitively stimulate one another.
- ‘trigger’ ideas that would not have otherwise thought of - Motivation
- more enjoyable
- can set high performance standards
Sources of process loss in brainstorming
- Free riding
- without individual accountability, not everyone may contribute - Low norms
- Everyone produces as many ideas as the worst person - Vertical thinking
- Members are influences by what others say and can’t break out of that line of thought - Anxiety and social inhibition
- feel uncomfortable sharing ideas with others - Production blocking
- difficult to generate ideas while other speaking
- have to mentally “hold on” to ideas others have stopped talking
Tuckman’s stages of group development
- Forming
- GM get to know; Rely on leader; Little sense of shared goals - Storming
- GM battle for power; Emotional reactions; More sense to the shared goals - Norming
- Status hierarchy and group processes become more defined; High cohesion; Decisions begin to be made - Performing
- Clear set of shared goals; Independence from leader; Attend to group processes; Focus on task.
Gersick’s Punctured Equilibrium(in group development)
Groups tend to demonstrate a “punctuation” of activity revolving around the mid-point of the team’s lifespan
The mid-point = critical paradigm shift where high performing teams engage in a concentrated burst of activity, adopting a new perspective.
Rhythmic Sonata Model
Successful teams follow the natural rhythms of team development
Consistent with the historic views of Tuckman and Gersick, teams experience three unique and relatively independent stages:
Introduction - Commitment - early stage (Build commitment to a shared goal)
Exposition - Productivity - middle stage (Group decision making; Role of conflict)
Codetta - Resolution - final stage (Review and feedback)
Contributions of additional group members
- Social loafing: Since group members do not have individual accountability, they may not contribute (or contribute as much as they could) to the group
- Rely on others to accomplish work
- People make less to achieve a goal when working in a group than when working alone - Contribution bias: Group members tend to think that they are contributing more than their fare share to the group
- Total of individual group members’ rating of own contribution > 100%
Asch’s conformity experiment
Originally, he invited many confederates and a real participant to ask a question about the length of the line. Confederates were instructed to tell that they think the answer is A. Even though the right answer was somewhat obvious, almost 40 % (33%) of the (real) participants indicated A as a right answer. These results about postures in the elevator (when confederates stand with their back to the doors, instead of facing them), and the lines showed much individuals’ opinions can be influenced by the majority group.
