W&O Team Dynamics Flashcards
What are Teams?
Groups of two or more people who
- Influence one another
- Exist to achieve goals associated with organisational objectives
- Are interdependent: coordinate, share information
- Perceive themselves to be a team
What are informal groups?
Groups in organisations that exist primarily for the benefit of their members. They have little or no interdependence and nor organisationally mandated purpose.
What do informal groups exist for?
- Innate drive to bond
- Social identity
- Achieve personal objectives
- Give social support to minimize stress by providing emotional and/or informational resources to buffer the stress experience
- Social networks: Social structures of individuals or social units that are connected to one another through one or more forms of independence.
What are the three characteristics which distinguish the type of team?
- Permanence
-> How long a team exist (hours to years) - Skill diversity
-> Variety of member skills & knowledge - Authority dispersion
->Degree to which decision-making responsibility is distributed throughout the team (high) or
centralized (low)
What are departmental teams and their success factors?
Employees located in same unit of a functional structure
- High team permanence
- Low skill diversity
- Low Authority dispersion
What are task force teams and their success factors?
Cross-functional teams with members drawn from several disciplines to solve a specific project/goal
- Low team permanence
- Medium-high skill diversity
- Medium authority dispersion
What are Self-directed teams? What are the two distinct features?
Self-directed teams (SDTs): Cross-functional work groups that are organized around work processes.
- They complete an entire piece of work requiring several interdependent tasks
- They have substantial autonomy over the execution of those tasks.
What are the success factors of self-directed teams?
- Responsible for entire work process
- High interdependence within the team, independent from other teams
- Autonomy to organise and coordinate work
-> Allows for quicker and more effective responses to client and stakeholder demands
-> Increases intrinsic motivation - Work site/technology support team communication/coordination and job enrichment
What are remote teams?
How do they differ from traditional teams? (Two ways)
Remote teams: Teams whose members operate across space, time, and organizational boundaries
and are linked through information technologies to achieve organizational tasks
They differ from traditional (colocated) teams in two ways
* One or more members work remotely at least some of the time
* Remote team members depend on information technologies in addition or instead of face-to-face interaction to communicate and coordinate their work effort.
What are the success factors of remote teams?
- Members need to apply the effective team behaviours (five Cs).
- Member characteristics (e.g. technology savvy, strong self-leadership, better emotional intelligence)
- Flexible use of various communication technologies
- Fairly high task structure
- Opportunities to meet face-to-face (fairly early in the team development process)
What are advantages of teams?
What are outcomes of these advantages?
- Breadth of knowledge and expertise
- Diversity of perspectives
- Potential for synergy and creativity
Outcomes -
* Better decisions, products/services, information sharing and coordination
* Higher employee motivation (drive to bond, accountability to team members, benchmarks {moving performance standard})
What are disadvantages of teams?
- Process losses (resources expended towards developing and maintaining teams instead of task)
Tends to increase with the team’s diversity and size. And adding new members ↓ - Social loafing (people exert less effort in a team)
What is Brook’s Law (Adding team members)
Brook’s Law: Adding people might slow down project
E.g. Adding more people to a late software project only makes it later
What does the Ringelmann effect (study) say about social loafing?
- Group performance was better than individual performance
- But performance per person decreased
- Loss increased as group becomes larger
When does Social loafing occur more?
- Individual performance hidden/indistinguishable
↳ Less visible in larger teams
↳ Hidden when team produces a single output - Work has low significance or is boring
- Individual characteristics: Low conscientiousness, agreeableness, and collectivism
- Employees aren’t motivated to help the team achieve its goals
What factors reduce an employees motivation to help the team?
- Occurs with low social identity with the team
- The belief that other team members aren’t pulling their weight
↳ Social loafers provide only as much effort as they believe others will provide - Belief of little control over the team’s success
↳ More likely to occur when the team is large - When the team is dependent on other members who have known performance problems
How can you minimize social loafing?
Make individual performance more visible
* Form smaller teams
* Measure individual performance
* Specialise tasks
Increase employee/team motivation
* Increase job enrichment (high task significance)
* Increase awareness of social loafing and team obligations
* Select motivated, team-oriented employees
What does Team Effectiveness rely on/how is it measured?
(Not the main components)
- Accomplishing tasks/organisational purpose
- Satisfaction and well-being of team members
- The ability and motivation of team members to maintain team survival
What are the three main components of the Team effectiveness model?
- Team environment: The context surrounding the team such as physical work space and organisational leadership
- Team design: Variables assigned to a team in creation and throughout its existence
- Team processes: The cognitive and emotional dynamics of the team that continually change with its development
What factors give the best environment for teams?
- Broad supportive resource pool available
- Team-based rewards
- Frequent communication and collaborative interactions encouraged by workplace design and technology access
- Supportive and inspiring leader
- Possible external motivating forces
Which characteristics support good team design?
- Complex tasks divisible into specialized roles
- Well-structured tasks - Easier to coordinate work among several people
- Low task variability & high task analysability (Same tasks, well-established procedures)
- Higher task interdependence
What are the three levels of task interdependence?
There are three types, the higher the level, the greater the need to organize people into teams rather than have them work alone, ONLY when they have the same task goals.
- Pooled interdependence: Employees have a shared resource in common
- Sequential interdependence: Employees output is fowarded to the next employee
- Reciprocal interdependence: Work output is exchanged back and forth among individuals or work units
Look at the picture in my notes for clarification
