Team working Flashcards
What is a team?
‘A team is a small number of people (usually between 3 and 15) 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, The wisdom of teams)
What’s the difference between group and team?
a group of friends drinks together in the pub, but a team competes in the pub quiz
What are teams responsible for?
teams are responsible for directing work, delegating tasks, coordinating activities, gathering information, making decisions, ordering materials, meeting objectives, controlling quality, and even hiring and firing
What is the transformation in management control in post-bureaucratic organizations through self-managing teams?
less direct and overt, more subtle and insidious
How are teams beneficial to organizations?
- increase employee commitment, motivation and therefore performance
- increase functional flexibility for core workers
- reduce monotony of tasks
free organizations from the shackles of bureaucracy - improve relations between workers and managers
e.g. participation in decision making reduces resistance - reduce costs
i.e. render low-level managers unnecessary - improve product quality and customer service
- respond to rapidly changing markets through innovation
e.g. through exploration, innovation and creative solutions
What are the disadvantages of team-working in organizations?
- decrease individual effort and motivation
- middle management layers may be redundant
- increase work intensification, working hours, cynicism and stress through self-management and self surveillance
- group norms can be counterproductive (e.g. resistance)
- group pressure suppresses different opinions within the group (“groupthink”)
- greater temptation to take risks
Do teams that work together harmoniously are better and more productive? (Contu, 2009)
- no, research shows that grumpy orchestras play together better than in orchestras where the musicians were happy
- satisfaction occurs after productivity, not vice versa
Does the performance of the group increases with its size?
- no, larger teams (e.g. with more resources) are not better performing than smaller ones (number of links that need to be managed increases as team size increases)
What is team composition?
Team composition is an important determinant of team processes and performances (Morgeson et al, 2010)
- demographic diversity and team-level personality traits and abilities are related to coordination, communication, helping behavior and cohesion among team members, within-team conflict, and information exchange
Does performance decline over time when teams don’t change their composition? (Contu, 2009)
no research actually shows that newness is a liability (e.g. flying crews; exception R&D teams)
Is team-working really a solution to cure all organizational problems?
“The ideas of ‘team’ at work must be one of the most widely used metaphors in organizational life. A group of workers or managers is generally described as a manager is generally described as a ‘team’, in much the same way that a company or department is often described as ‘big family’. But…the mental image of cohesion, coordination, and common goals which [is] conjured up by metaphor of the team [is] entirely different from everyday reality of working life” (Hayes, Successful team management)
What is an overview of Barker’s (1993) ‘Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in managing teams’
- Managerial shift from hierarchical, bureaucratic control to peer-based ‘concertive control’ (Tompkins & Cheney 1985) in self-manging teams
- from formal legal-rational rules to formalized systems of value-based normative rules
- Concertive control is ‘more powerful, less apparent, and more difficult to resist than that of former bureaucracy’ (Barker, p408)
What is “from formal rules to consensual values”?
Reorganization of workspace
from individualized place at assembly line to self-sufficient work areas
Negotiation of value consensus around ‘corporate vision statement’ to guide team-work
what constitutes good work and the necessary behaviors to enact this consensus
“Under the old system, who gave a hoot if the [circuit] boards shipped today or not? We just did out jobs. Now, we have more buy-in by the team members. We feel more personal responsibility for the product” (Interview with ISE employee; Baker, p.422)
What are the effects of team-working at ISE?
- Taking ‘personal responsibility’ for the product
- ‘Taking ownership’ of work
- ‘Being committed’ to success
- ‘Treating team-mates as ‘family members’ (Barker, p422)
- “These values are morally binding on the team-members because they represent the will of the teams and were arrived at through the democratic participation of the team members… The old rationality and ethic of obeying the supervisor has given way to… the teams’ value consensus
What is from consensual values to formalized normative rules?
- The team’s value consensus was made explicable to new members not through further negotiation, but through explicit guidelines
- enforced by punishment and rewards
- “need to ‘obey’ the team’s work norms” (Barker, p425)
- Team members tolerate infractions to these guidelines even less than formal supervisors — hence, a tightening of the iron cage
- “If the boss is not around, I can sit there and talk to my neighbour or do what I want. Now the whole team is around me and the whole team is observing what I’m doing” (Interview with ISE employee; Barker p.408)
- locus of authority
