Week 1

Question 1

What is effective teamwork?

Answer 1

-Effective teamwork allows teams to produce outcomes
greater than the sum of individual members’ contributions
-It is driven by:
+team processes i.e., “interdependent acts that convert inputs to outcomes through cognitive, verbal, and behavioural activities directed toward organizing taskwork to achieve collective goals.
+emergent states i.e., dynamic properties of the team that vary depending upon various factors

Question 2

What is a Team Development Intervention (TDI)?

Answer 2

-TDI is a systematic activity aimed at improving requisite team competencies, processes, and overall effectiveness.

Question 3

What is Team training?

Answer 3

-Team training is a formalized, structured learning experience with preset objectives and curriculum that target specific team competencies. Furthermore it is improving these competencies and it fosters enhanced teamwork by promoting improvement in specific teamwork skills linked to team performance.

Question 4

What are the 4 types of TDI?

Answer 4

1. Team training
2. Leadership training
3. Team building
4. Team debriefing

Question 5

What is Leadership training and what are its positive aspects?

Answer 5

• Leadership training refers to interventions systematically designed to enhance leader knowledge, skills, abilities, and other components.
  1. It increases a leader’s learning and their ability to utilize concepts on the job
  2. influences desired subordinate outcomes
  3. increases leadership capabilities which enhance team performance

Question 6

What is the extent to which learning transfers into on-the-job behaviours is influenced by?

Answer 6

1. training design features
2. trainee characteristics
3. characteristics of the work environment

Question 7

What is a needs analysis?

Answer 7

-A needs analysis reflects the “process of gathering data to determine what training needs exist so that training can be developed to help the organization accomplish its objectives.

Question 8

What are the benefits of the needs analysis?

Answer 8

1. You determine the teams that require training, the KSAs that are required for effectively accomplishing team tasks, organizational goals, and other factors that will influence training success, as well as the KSAs that are essential for effective teamwork.
2. It detects where gaps exist between existing and desired skills and tailors training to fill those gaps.
3. provides insight into whether the organization will support training transfer

Question 9

What are the 3 dimensions of delivery methods?

Answer 9

1. information
2. demonstration
3. practice
   * most effective programs tend to include a mix of the three
   * *also use of feedback in both leadership and team training.

Question 10

What is the key concept of leadership training?

Answer 10

• The desired outcome
• when designing a leadership training program, it might be more beneficial to include (and evaluate) cognitive and/or skill-based content. Desired outcome(s) should also be identified early on during training development

Question 11

What is the key concept of Team Training?

Answer 11

• Training Goals
• training goals should be set at the team level and outcomes should be evaluated at the team level
• Psychological safety
• a sense of confidence among team members that the team can take interpersonal risks and that “the team will not ridicule, reject, or punish someone for speaking up”

Question 12

What is Team Building and what are its 4 components?

Answer 12

• Team building has been defined as an intervention designed to foster improvement within a team, providing individuals closely involved with the task with the strategies and information needed to solve their own problems.
  1. Goal setting->specific goals can improve performance
  2. Interpersonal-Relationship management->developing trust and resolving conflict
  3. Role clarification-uncovering role ambiguities and conflicts and then establishing clear roles within the team
  4. Problem solving-> helping team members identify and solve task-related problems as well as identifying effective decision making processes.

Question 13

What are the 4 mechanisms of goal setting?

Answer 13

1. directing attention and effort toward identified goals
2. energizing
3. affecting persistence
4. affecting action through
   the discovery and/or use of knowledge pertinent to the task

Question 14

What is Interpersonal-relationship management?

Answer 14

• Interpersonal-relationship management is a component that fosters trust and provides team members with ways to manage team conflict effectively.
• Involves a facilitator fostering:
  1. open conversations
  2. resolve any existing conflicts
  3. improve trust
• conflict management is also important for effective team functioning

Question 15

What are the 3 main conflict resolution techniques?

Answer 15

1. targeting content,
2. discussing the rationale for work assignments
3. assigning work based on expertise

Question 16

What is team debriefing?

Answer 16

-Team debriefing represents “one of the most promising methods for accelerating learning from experience. During a team debrief, team members reflect on a performance episode or experience.

Question 17

What are the 5 TDIs?

Answer 17

1. General Training
2. Specific Training
3. Team Training
4. Team Building
5. Team Debriefing

Question 18

What are the key points of general training?

Answer 18

• Use multiple and effective training methods
• Conduct a needs analysis
• Provide diagnostic feedback
• Ensure stakeholders’ expectations align with the goals of the training

Question 19

What are the key points of Leadership training?

Answer 19

• Target soft skills to enhance subordinate teamwork
• Provide training on leadership styles related to teamwork
• Target skills related to initiating structure
• Evaluate cognitive and/or skill-based content

Question 20

What are the key points of Team training?

Answer 20

• Set training goals at the team level
• Evaluate team processes and outcomes to assess training
• Foster psychological safety during training

Question 21

What are the key points of Team building?

Answer 21

• Clarify needs of the teams to identify which components are most needed for team improvement
• Incorporate discussions and exercises that enable the team to self-discover concerns that can hurt their effectiveness
• Guide the team to develop tangible action plans/agreements
• Follow up on plans/agreements to maintain accountability

Question 22

What are the key points of Team debriefing?

Answer 22

• Ensure a psychologically safe team climate exists
• If possible, use a trained facilitator, regardless provide ample structure to the debrief
• Focus on performance- and teamwork-related categories, rather than reviewing events chronologically
• Discuss positive and negative examples of behaviour
• Document conclusions and agreements reached

Question 23

According to Hollenbeck, Beersma and Schouten (2012) one of the following statements concerning the dimension of ‘authority differentiation’ is false:

a) Teams are differentiated by authority differentiation, skill differentiation and temporal stability.
b) Teams with high authority differentiation are efficient in decision making and have a high support for the decisions made.
c) Judge-Advisior-Systems have high authority differentiation scores.
d) Authority differentiation describes the degree to which decision making responsibility is vested in individual members.

Answer 23

b) Teams with high authority differentiation are efficient in decision making and have a high support for the decisions made.

Question 24

Why it’s better to distinguish teams into dimensions than categories?

Answer 24

• The literature on teams could benefit from a consensus on the fundamental underlying dimensions that serve as crucial theoretical and empirical differentiators when comparing alternative teams, and then treating the dimension level.
• There would be no need to convert these continuous and multidimensional data into dichotomous combinations, all of which would have to be identified, and a list of key underlying dimensions could be established.
• Because the team kinds are all built on one or a mix of underlying continuous dimensions, it may draw extensively on and use this historical tradition.

Question 25

What are the 3 dimensions of Scaling Model for Team Description?

Answer 25

1. skill differentiation: who performs various tasks
2. authority differentiation: who has authority to make various decisions
3. temporal stability of team membership: structural linkages may be short term or long-lasting

Question 26

How could the the three-dimensional framework be used by managers?

Answer 26

• It could be used to generate a standardized diagnostic model for managers that would allow them to:
  1. locate precisely where their own team is in this conceptual space
  2. learn the typical virtues and liabilities associated with that space
  3. predict the likely implications for moving the team to a different space via restructuring or membership change