O.b. c 10 understanding work teams

UNDERSTANDING WORK TEAMS

Dr.Rajesh KamathAssistant Professor,Department of Public Health,Manipal university

Understanding Work Teams

• Teams today are very popular. Why?• Teams are more flexible and responsive to

changing events than traditional departments.• They are an effective means for management

to democratize organisations….• …thereby increasing employee motivation.

Understanding Work Teams – Differences between Groups and Teams.

• Are Groups and Teams the same thing?• No…Why?

WORK GROUPS WORK TEAMS

A group that interacts primarily to share information and to make decisions to help each group member perform within his or her area of responsibility.

A group whose individual efforts result in performance that is greater than the sum of the individual inputs.

Their performance is merely the summation of each group member’s individual contribution. There is no Synergy.

A work team generates positive Synergy through coordinated effort.


• The use of teams creates the potential for an organisation to generate greater outputs with no increase in inputs.

• Merely calling a group a team will not help. Effective teams have certain common characteristics, as we shall see…

Understanding Work Teams – Types of teams

• Types of teams : • 1. Problem solving teams.• 2. Self managed work teams.• 3. Cross functional teams.• 4. Virtual teams.

Understanding Work Teams – Problem solving teams

• 1. Problem solving teams : Groups of 5 to 12 employees from the same department who meet for a few hours each week to discuss ways of improving quality, efficiency, and the work environment.

• Members share ideas on work processes and methods. But rarely have the authority to implement any suggestions.

• Merrill Lynch created a problem solving team to reduce the number of days it took to open a new cash management account. Number of steps reduced from 46 to 36. Number of days from 15 to 8.

Understanding Work Teams – Self managed work teams

• 2. Self managed work teams : Groups of 10 to 15 people who take on responsibilities of their former supervisors like planning and scheduling work, assigning tasks to members, operating decisions, working with suppliers and customers.

• They might even select and evaluate their own members.• Not only solve problems, but implement solutions and take

responsibility for outcomes.• Research not uniformly positive. Why?• Do not manage conflicts well.• When disputes arise, members stop cooperating, group

performance decreases.

Understanding Work Teams – Cross functional teams.

• 3. Cross functional teams : Employees from about the same hierarchical level, but from different work areas, who come together to accomplish a task.

• Boeing formed a team from production, planning, quality control, tooling, design engineering and information systems for its C 17 program. The team’s suggestions drastically reduced cycle time and costs as well as improved quality.

• All the major automobile manufacturers – Toyota, Honda, Renault, Suzuki, Tata, Ford currently use this form of team.

• The early stages of development are long, as members learn to deal with diversity and complexity. It takes time to build trust and teamwork.


• 4. Virtual teams : Teams that use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members in order to achieve a common goal.

• Wide area networks, video conferencing, email.• Less social support, less direct interaction among members,

less satisfaction.• For effectiveness, managers should ensure:• 1. Trust is established among members.• 2. Team progress is monitored closely.• 3. The efforts of the team are publicised throughout the

organisation.


• Creating Effective teams : • The team effectiveness model :• The model attempts to generalise across all

varieties of teams, hence cannot be rigidly applied to all teams.

• The model assumes teamwork is preferable to individual work.

CONTEXT : 1. ADEQUATE RESOURCES2. LEADERSHIP AND STRUCTURE3. CLIMATE OF TRUST4. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND REWARD SYSTEMS

COMPOSITION :1. ABILITIES OF MEMBERS2. PERSONALITY3. ALLOCATING ROLES4. DIVERSITY5. SIZE OF TEAMS6. MEMBER FLEXIBILITY7. MEMBER PREFERENCES

PROCESS1. COMMON PURPOSE2. SPECIFIC GOALS3. TEAM EFFICACY4. CONFLICT LEVELS5. SOCIAL LOAFING

TEAM EFFECTIVENESS


• 1. CONTEXT : • 1.1 Adequate resources : • Timely information• Proper equipment• Adequate staffing• Encouragement• Administrative assistance


• 1.2. Leadership and Structure :• Agreeing on the specifics of work and how

they fit together to integrate individual skills requires leadership and structure, either from management or from the team members themselves.

• Especially important in multi-team systems.


• 1.3 Climate of trust :• In each other.• In their leader.• Reduces the need to monitor each others’

behaviour.• More likely to take risks and expose

weaknesses.• Trust is the foundation of leadership.


• 1.4 Performance evaluation and reward systems :

• In addition to rewarding the individual, management should have team based evaluation and rewards like

• 1. Group based appraisals.• 2. Profit sharing.• 3. Gainsharing.• 4. Small-group incentives.

Understanding Work Teams – Team composition – Abilities of members

• 2. TEAM COMPOSITION :• 2.1 Abilities of members : • These abilities set limits on what members can do and how

effectively they will perform on a team.• 3 skills required in a team : • 1. Technical expertise.• 2. Problem solving and decision making skills to identify

problems, generate and evaluate alternatives and make competent choices.

• 3. Interpersonal skills.• The team members can learn these skills if they do not possess

them.

Understanding Work Teams – Team composition – Abilities of members

• Research reveals:• When the task entails considerable thought (solving a complex problem

such as reengineering an assembly line), high ability teams (composed of mostly intelligent members) do better than low ability teams.

• High ability teams are more adaptable to changing situations.• Surprisingly, when tasks are simple, high ability teams do not perform as

well, perhaps because members become bored and turn their attention to other activities that are more stimulating, whereas low ability teams stay on task.

• Smart team leaders help less intelligent team members when they struggle with a task.

• But a less intelligent leader can neutralise the effect of a high ability team.

Understanding Work Teams – Team composition – Personality of members

• 2.2 Personality of members : • 3 dimensions relevant to team effectiveness : • 1. Conscientiousness – Good at backing up other

team members, and also good at sensing when that support is truly needed.

• 2. Openness to experience – Communicate better, more creative, innovative.

• 3. Team member agreeableness – Teams do worse when they have one or more highly disageeable members.


• Suppose an organisation needs to create 20 teams of 4 people each and has 40 highly conscientious people and 40 who score low on conscientiousness, would the organisation be better off…

• (a) Forming 10 teams of highly conscientious people and 10 teams of members low on conscientiousness, OR

• (b) “Seeding” each team with 2 people who scored high and 2 who scored low on conscientiousness.


• Option (a), WHY?• Contribution inequity.• Highly conscientious people might need to

perform their own tasks as well as that of those low on conscientiousness.

Understanding Work Teams – Team composition – Allocation of roles

• 2.3 Allocation of roles : • As managers, we should know that research

suggests that we ought to put our most Able, Experienced, and Conscientious workers in the most central roles in a team.

Understanding Work Teams – Team composition – Allocation of roles

Understanding Work Teams – Team composition – Diversity of Members

• 2.4 Diversity of Members : • How does team diversity affect team performance?• Team members are generally focussed on their similarities,

i.e. commonly held information or skills. Is that ideal?• But to realise their creative potential, diverse teams need

to focus on their differences.• The key is for members of diverse teams to communicate

what they uniquely know and also what they do not know.• Inspirational common goal provided – teams are very

creative.


• Organisational demography : The degree to which members of a work unit share a common demographic attribute such as age, sex, race, educational level or length of service in an organisation, and the impact of this attribute on the turnover.

• Turnover will be greater among those with dissimilar experiences because communication is more difficult.

• Conflict and power struggles are more likely and are more severe when they occur.

• Increased conflict makes membership less attractive, so employees are more likely to quit.

• The losers in a power struggle are more likely to leave voluntarily or be forced out.


• 2.5 Size of teams : • Most effective teams – 5 to 9 members.• Experts suggest using the smallest number of people who can do

the task.• Unnecessarily large teams…• 1….will have Coordination issues, especially under time pressure.• 2. Social loafing.• 3. More people communicate less.• If a natural working unit is larger and you want a team effort,

what do you do?• Consider breaking the group into subteams.


• 2.6 Member preferences : • Not everybody is a team player.• When non team players are put in a team,

there is a direct threat to the team morale and to individual member satisfaction.

• As managers…• …consider individual preferences along with

abilities, personalities, and skills.

Understanding Work Teams – Team Processes –Common plan and purpose

• 3. TEAM PROCESSES• 3.1 Common plan and Purpose :• Teams that establish a clear sense of what needs

to be done and how consistently perform better.• Perfectly executing the wrong plan is a lost cause.• Effective teams show reflexivity – meaning they

reflect on and adjust their master plan when necessary.

Understanding Work Teams – Team Processes – Specific goals

• 3.2 Specific Goals : • Successful teams translate their common purpose

into specific, measurable and realistic performance goals.

• Specific goals facilitate clear communication.• They help teams maintain their focus on getting

results.• Difficult goals raise team performance; eg. Goals for

quantity tend to raise quantity, goals for accuracy raise accuracy.

Understanding Work Teams – Team Processes – Team efficacy

• 3.3 Team Efficacy : is the belief in success that a team has.

• Teams that have tasted success have more belief in their future success, which in turn motivates them to work harder.

• What can management do to increase team efficacy?• 1. Help the team achieve small successes that build

confidence.• 2. Provide training to improve members’ technical and

interpersonal skills.

Understanding Work Teams–Team Processes–Team efficacy–Mental models

• Mental Models : Team members’ knowledge and beliefs about how the work gets done by the team.

• If team members have different ideas about how to do things, the team will fight over how to do things rather than focus on what need to be done.

Understanding Work Teams – Team Processes – Conflict levels

• 3.4 Conflict Levels : • What is your opinion on conflict?• Conflict in a team is not necessarily bad.• What happens when teams are completely devoid of conflict?• They are likely to become apathetic and stagnant.• But Relationship conflicts – those based on interpersonal

incompatibilities, tension, and animosity- are dysfunctional.• However, Task conflicts – disagreements over task content – stimulate

discussion, promote critical assessment of problems and options, and can lead to better team decisions.

• Effective teams resolved conflicts by explicitly discussing the issues.

• Ineffective teams had conflicts focussed more on personalities and the way things were said.


• 3.5 Social Loafing : • Effective teams take care of this by making

members individually and jointly accountable.• Members should be clear on what they are

individually responsible for and what they are jointly responsible for on the team.

Understanding Work Teams – Turning individuals into team players

• As managers, what are your options to turn individuals into team players?

• 1. Selecting : Hiring team players.• 2. Training : Creating team players.• 3. Rewarding : Providing incentives to be a

good team player.

Understanding Work Teams–Turning individuals into team players-Selecting:Hiring

team players• 1. Selecting : Hiring team players.• Some people already possess the interpersonal skills to be

effective team players.• As managers, what should you look at when hiring people?• Make sure candidates can fulfill their team roles as well as

technical requirements.• When faced with candidates who lack team skills, what are

your options?• 1. Training to become team players.• 2. Transfer them to another unit that does not have teams.• 3. Don’t hire them.

Understanding Work Teams–Turning individuals into team players-Training : Creating team players

• 2. Training : Creating team players.• Training specialists conduct exercises that allow

employees to experience the satisfaction teamwork can provide.

• Workshops – problem solving, communication, negotiation, conflict-management.

• Team building exercises – Paintball – Capture the flag.

Understanding Work Teams–Turning individuals into team players-Rewarding• 3. Rewarding : Providing incentives to be a good team player.• Encourage cooperative efforts rather than competitive ones.• Eg. : Hallmark cards added to its basic individual-incentive

system an annual bonus based on achievement of team goals. How does this influence team members?

• As a result, teams select new members carefully so they will contribute to team effectiveness (and thus team bonuses)

• It is usually best to set a cooperative tone as soon as possible in the life of a team.

• Teams that rush from a competitive to a cooperative system do not share information and make rushed, poor-quality decisions.

Understanding Work Teams–HOMEWORK

• 1. Beware! Teams are not always the answer.• 2. Global implications.• 3. Summary and implications for managers.

• References : • ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR - STEPHEN

ROBBINS – 14TH EDITION

THANK YOU

O.b. c 10 understanding work teams

Business

Transcript of O.b. c 10 understanding work teams