Wei, Zhe
Over the past few decades, a considerably great deal of research has been done to analyse the topics of work groups and teams in organizations from all perspectives. Two decades ago, Campion et al. conducted an investigation of relationships between work group characteristics and effectiveness from five themes – job design, interdependence, composition, context and process. It pointed out that the organizations using teams were just becoming popular. While companies were having difficulties with groups and teams which sometimes might result in negative outcomes like low productivity, less effective decision making and conflict. However, in terms of some models and reviews at that time, groups and teams were conceivable to simultaneously boost both productivity and the satisfaction of employees (Campion et al., 1993). Decades ago, Kozlowski and Ilgen highlighted recommendations for enhancing the effectiveness of work groups and teams. It established an emerging science of team effectiveness based on solid evidence of cognitive, motivational and behavioral process and emergent states with adequate interventions focusing on team design, team training, and team leadership that shape team processes and enhance team performance (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2006). Recent studies are either diving deep to explore the potential impact of intra-group value diversity in relation to both team processes and task performance within a comprehensive design/methodology/approach framework, which finally implied the pessimistic view of diversity – value diversity leads to more conflict, less team efficacy, and lower team cohesion (Woehr et al., 2013), or moving further to a broad landscape organizing the last 10 years of empirical work around 10 main themes and foreseeing toward 10 opportunities for future research on virtual teams (Gilson et al., 2015).
The objective of this essay is to provide a short qualitative synthetic review on such theme. The initial focus of the review is to introduce the nature and characteristics of groups and teams. Given understanding of the nature of teams, then, it will present a generalization of appropriateness and inaptness of teams based on the context of both demographic and social networks vantage points and identify two issues that teams might confront associated with their causes, consequences and foremost possible preventions or heals. Finally, the essay will be end with a discussion of the essence behind these superficials.
Work groups and teams can be defined as (a) a composition of tow or more individuals, (b) who socially interact (face-to-face or, increasingly, virtually) and (c) exist to perform organizationally relevant tasks together, (d) share one or more common goals, (e) exhibit interdependencies with respect to flow, goal and outcomes, (f) have various roles and responsibilities to maintain and manage boundaries, (g) are embedded in an organizational system that sets boundaries, constrains the team, and influences exchanges with other units in the boarder entity (Alderfer, 1977; Argote & McGrath, 1993; Hackman, 1987; Hollenbeck et al., 1995; Kozlowski & Bell, 2003; Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006; Kozlowski, Gully, McHugh, Salas, & Cannon-Bowers, 1996; Kozlowski et al., 1999; Salas et al., 1992). Given the definition of work groups and teams, general characteristics can be extracted as size, interdependence of members, team identity, team goals and team structure. More widely accepted characteristics were identified as job design, interdependence, composition, context and process by (Campion et al., 1993). And Hackman also provide the essential of characteristics such as shared objectives, interdependence, membership boundaries, authority and responsibility and autonomy (Hackman et al., 2000). The presented characteristics are expressed with different glossaries but essentially are shared with common meanings. Bestowed with such nature, groups and teams can be specified with potential strength and weakness. Teams can not always answer the questions. Sometimes teams could give rise to the effective outcomes but sometimes not.
When Teams Are Appropriate and When They Are Not Though almost all of the contemporary corporates have adopted team in organizations to confront fierce business environment, to deal with complex tasks, or to handle market uncertainties or control risks, team has its potential advantage and disadvantage in nature, such as on one side better human resource utilization, quick implementation and delivery, more agility to response change and on the other side rooted conflict, less effective decision making, social loafing and so forth. Hackman also presented the situation in which teams do not work and pointed out six mistakes that managers might make: (a) use a team for work that is better done by individuals, (b) call the performing unit a team but really manage members as individuals, (c) fall off the authority balance beam, (d) dismantle existing organizational structures so that teams will be fully empowered to accomplish the work, (e) specify challenging team objectives, but skimp on organizational supports, (f) assume that member already have all the skills they need to work well as a team (Hackman, 1998).
Among these phenomenon, two major problems can be identified that groups and teams might face. One is the conflict and the other is less effective decision making. The conflict can be further categorized as task conflict, emotional conflict. (Pelled et al., 1999) have suggested that conflict plays a central role in the relationship between diversity and work group outcomes. Diversity shapes both task conflict and emotional conflict, and the conflict might in turn shapes performance and outcomes. Moreover, the diversity of demographic attributes like race and tenure that relatively impermeable may increase emotional conflict, which in turn brings to negative consequences to performance. Other studies have introduced status conflicts from another perspective. The status conflicts defined as disputes over individual’s relative status (for example, respect) or positions in the one’s social hierarchy behave as a key process that affects team’s performance (Bendersky and Hays, 2012). No matter in what form that the conflict will be or how they are categorized, the conflict would hinder the cohesion and performance of teams. To prevent such conflict, organizations could make endeavors either from corporate level or from the team level. Human resource department may hold training for new staff together to share the value and vision of the company, which allow them to understand corporate better and to know each other better. Within the team, the team lead could appoint senior staff as a role of mentor to assist new staff to become more professional and the lead might also hold team retrospective meeting and encourage each member to express their opinion on daily work, project related issues or communication issues. Team has its members and sizes; it is composed by individuals. As no two persons are identical, no one could enforce each individual to share the same idea or the same value. Under most circumstances, team members work as seek common ground while reserving differences. When a team goes for a decision making process, it might be less effective. If members are at the same pay level and all of them are strong and less likely to be compromised, the decision making process will last long. On the other hand, if any person is too strong, faster and more capable than anybody else. The hippo is dangerous because everyone will follow. Several practical methods would be helpful to prevent low efficient group decisions such as devil’s-advocate approach that a person will be appointed to prepare a detailed counterargument that list what is wrong with the group’s favored solution and why the group should not use it. Similar method developed by Dr. Edward de Bono that enable group members to behave as the be endowed characteristic rather than who they really are. Other methods like brainstorming or nominal group techniques such as Delphi method are also quite effective.
All of the above possible strategic preventions have limitation. They are by no means silver-bullet. It is essentially because team is complex and dynamic in nature as each individual of which it composed is also complex and dynamic. Think of a scale, on one side it holds team cohesion, on the other, it holds team diversity. Both of team cohesion and team diversity possess the characteristics of pros and cons under different circumstance. Team itself is dynamic and the environment that team exist in is also dynamic. Therefore, it is unlikely to establish a direct causal relationship between team characteristics and team outcomes.
This essay presented a general analysis on the strength and weakness of team associated with its nature. It identified two problems that team might face as well as possible strategic preventions. As all of the evidences are based on the study of other researches, future research would further design methods to validate their results, or would further attempt to design a quantitative model to analyse the relationship between phenomenon and causes.
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