teams

Question 1

Why are teams a useful unit of analysis?

Answer 1

• teams is a useful unit of analysis when people have a heterogeneity of skills and competences , then a team becomes more effective than the most skilled person alone –> diversity of knowledges embedded
• in many contexts we need teams especially in highly interdependent contexts

Question 2

Why don’t teams always outperform the best individual member?

Answer 2

-expertise recognition and collaboration can be difficult for eg even the expert in the group may not realise they are the expert
- can be affected by many factors other than performance for eg self-confidence

Question 3

What makes a rowing team?

Answer 3

• strong team identification –> associated with reduced conflict, more trust + members who identify are less likely to free-ride and more likely to place team needs before individual needs
• trust –> critical to team performance on tasks that are interdependent and require coordination

Question 4

What’s the formula for making a team effective?

Answer 4

opportunityabilitymotivation = performance

Question 5

What are the 3 things needed to make a team effective ? How does each element affect a team to make it more effective?

Answer 5

1. information sharing
   - affects opportunity and ability
   -driven by psychological safety
   - organisational network structure : gatekeepers, boundary spanners, knowledge brokers
2. diversity of the team
   - shared information more likely to take place
   - covers more areas of knowledge
   - skills-based diversity VS relations-oriented diversity

Question 6

What are the pros and cons of holacracy?

Answer 6

pros:
- project teams take their own responsibility
- holacracy allows each person to influence the governance of the organisation even if you are not high in the organisation –> feel recognised
- information sharing and access made easier because people belong to a variety of networks since there is no hierarchy
- teams are carefully put together

cons:
- possible inertia : who takes the decisions since there is no hierarchy? problems of bottleneck left unresolved
- large initiatives will be bureaucratic
- logrolling : lack of clarity as to how compensation works

Question 7

What’s the relation between cognitively diverse and psychologically safe teams?

Answer 7

cognitively diverse and psychologically safe teams make teams more effective and share 4 positive behaviours/emotions in common:
1. oppositional
2.generative
3.defensive
4.uniform

So what separates the best teams from the rest? It turns out that it’s a combination of cognitive diversity and psychological safety.
- Teams high in both traits show curious and encouraging behavior, and also the level of forcefulness and experimentation needed to keep their momentum. - -Teams low in either trait were either too combative (if they were high in cognitive diversity and low in psychological safety) or too prone to group-think (if the reverse was true).

Question 8

How is Zappos teams different from other traditional teams?

Answer 8

• teams are autonomous and democratic and people just take rounds to explore issues
• leadership is distributed among roles and continuously shift
• complicated to allocate work and compensation

Question 9

How can we capitalise on diversity?

Answer 9

• determine each person’s abilities and expertise up front
• engage in TEAM BUILDING for members to know each other better and enable info sharing
• foster team norms of openness, mutual respect to generate trust and foster a team identity
  -engage in perspective taking

Question 10

What are 3 types of team conflict and are they beneficial?

Answer 10

1. task-based conflict –> can be beneficial
2. interpersonal conflict –> always dysfunctional
3. process conflict –> usually dysfunctional

Question 11

What are challenges of virtual teams?

Question 12

How to manage virtual teams and bring trust?

Question 13

when is skill-based diversity most beneficial and when is relations-oriented diversity most useful?

Answer 13

• skills-based diversity useful for creative tasks like in innovation and high tech but negative for manufacturing
• relations-oriented diversity useful for service industries but negative in manufacturing and high tech

Question 14

what are problems with diversity in teams?

Answer 14

• hamper team cohesion
• create conflict and mistrust
• reduce ability to reach consensus and take quick decisions

Question 15

when is diversity most beneficial?

Answer 15

• diversity is best for non routine and creative tasks eg solving an unseen problem
  -during the problem definition stage