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Best Practice Review Template: Building Team Effectiveness By Tony Vickers-Willis

1. Introduction This paper highlights four areas that leaders can influence to achieve best practice levels in the effectiveness of their teams and team based decision-making, which we uncovered during a literature review on team effectiveness. Team based approaches to getting work done have become a more common business method, especially as work has become more knowledge based and as firms have realised the potential power of employee participation. Carpolio, Andrewartha & Armstrong (2001) cite numerous studies that reveal the many advantages of teams which include increases in productivity, morale, efficiency and quality. However, just getting people together and calling them a team by no means makes them an effective team nor a team that makes effective decisions. In fact, although teams have gained substantial popularity sometimes they lead to negative outcomes, such as low productivity, poor decisions, and conflict (Campion, Medsker & Higgs, 1993). Also, organisational psychologists have identified some processes which impede team effectiveness like personality factors, social conformity, communication skills, and domination by particular individuals (West, M. Borrill, C. & Unsworth, K. 1998). In fact, our typical command and control structures for operating our businesses through clearly stated goals, explicit rules and highly specified roles to help reduce uncertainty and make things more predictable in organisations are in fact undermining the success of our teams (Ashmos & Nathan, 2002). To be effective, most teams need to be managed and there is considerable evidence highlighting what leaders can do to influence improvement in team effectiveness.

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2. Four Key Areas of Leader Influence The four key areas of influence are: A. B. C. D.

team leadership, team development, team composition & size, and problem solving and team based decision-making.

A. Team Leadership Considerable research evidence shows that leaders affect team performance (West, Borril & Unsworth, 1998). One author goes as far as to say that the relationship between employees and their leaders is three times more powerful than all other factors combined in accounting for financial success” (Carpolio et al, 2001) including the next best 4 predictors - market share, capital intensity, firm size, sales growth. Our research identified four key ways in which a team leadership can be improved: 1. 2. 3. 4.

effective managerial communications, using motivational language, establishing “spirit” and establishing a sense of belonging.

A key team leadership skill is managerial communication; that is, specific communication that creates a sense of team mission and direction, an understanding of interdependencies, and that encourages cohesiveness, trust, and enthusiasm. Communication itself is of course ultimately an interpersonal process that can suffer the same barriers for teams as it does with individuals, and team managers must guard against filtering, selective perception, information overload, defensiveness and language. An approach recommended to help overcome barriers and improve managerial communications was referred to by Carpolio et al (2001) as “supportive manager communications”, a framework that appears heavily influenced by the five components of emotional intelligence proposed by Goleman (1998). The supportive manager communications model has eight key features: problem (not person) focused, message congruence, descriptive (not evaluative) focused, validates individuals, specific (not global), conjunctive with other messages, message is owned by source and listening. Further, Mayfield, Mayfield and Kopf (1998) showed how important a manager‟s language was to motivating people, noting also the important role played by direction giving, sharing feelings and explaining culture. Employee productivity is also a product of being clear about what is expected of them and understanding how their work fits in with the whole direction. Managers can assist this linkage by conducting goal setting and ©Vickers-Willis Corporation 2009

feedback sessions with teams on a regular basis. If handled using effective supportive communications, such sessions can be a source of not only reduced frustration, stress and burnout but also increased motivation. However, the essence of genuinely high performance teams seems to transcend even these management characteristics. In a discussion on the amazing performance of Data General‟s Eagle Group it is revealed that “the essence of high performance is spirit” (Bolman & Deal, 1992). Similarly, “spirit” seems to be at the heart of the effectiveness of AT&T‟s unconventional but nevertheless high achieving Bell Labs, as portrayed in the article titled “Hot Groups” by Leavitt & Lipman-Blumen (1995). I suspect the establishment of Microsoft also had this “spirit”. These groups had something extra special, where team members held a consuming, passionate and infatuated preoccupation with achieving the end result - an „esprit de corps‟ team culture. In a Harvard Business Review interview, gridiron-coaching icon Bill Walsh adds “those teams that have been most successful are the ones that have demonstrated the greatest commitment to their people. They are the one‟s that have created the greatest sense of belonging” (Rapaport, 1993). Walsh added that it is very important to recognise and respond to the unique needs of individuals. So, team leaders create effective teams through managerial communications, motivating language, creating spirit and creating a sense of belonging.

B. Team Development To create an effective team also requires the leader to understand the natural stages of development that teams follow, and to facilitate the team through those stages to achieve maturity. The most commonly cited team development model is that articulated by Tuckman (1965) who identified 4 stages of team development: forming, storming, norming and performing. Tuckman noted that team functioning and effectiveness is different at each stage and can be stalled by difficulties the team has in moving through these stages. In order for a team to be effective, the team must progress through the first 3 stages to achieve the final effective stage – performing. Tuckman also noted that there are actions that managers can take to help teams migrate through the stages, and thereby improve the team‟s performance and decision-making effectiveness. To illustrate, a manager can assist teams migrate through the first “forming” stage by providing formal opportunity for personal introductions of teams‟ members and clarifying team goals and procedures. Another less publicised although no less interesting model of team development that managers and team members can use to diagnose team performance was put forward by Drexler, Sibbet and Forrester (1994), called the “Team Performance Model”. The seven steps in this model are: Orientation, Trust Building, Goal/Role Clarification, ©Vickers-Willis Corporation 2009

Commitment, Implementation, High Performance and Renewal. This model can provide leaders with another way of thinking about how to improve team performance, however there is considerable overlap with the Tuckman model. The Team Performance Model was based on Gibb‟s scheme that seems heavily grounded in the same interpersonal issues noted in Tuckman‟s model, namely inclusion, control and affection. Additionally, although the authors state that progression through the seven stages is not chronological, they note that successful resolution of issues at earlier stages allows issues of later stages to surface and be addressed, which again is very similar to Tuckman‟s model. So, there are considerable issues around team development that a leader needs to manage in order to achieve effective team performance and effective team decision-making.

C. Team Composition & Size The composition of teams is yet another way in which leaders can influence effectives of teams and their decision-making. Campion et al (1993) suggested four aspects of team composition that influence effectiveness: 1. 2. 3. 4.

heterogeneity of abilities and experiences, job assignment flexibility, team size, and team member role preferences when working in teams.

I will comment here on just two of these: heterogeneity and team size. Heterogeneity in terms of diversity in skills, abilities, knowledge and thinking is known to provide a broadened Bank from which the team can draw, as well as adding to innovation and creativity of thinking. Of course, heterogeneity has draw cards – trust can be more difficult to achieve. Some research in fact suggests that teams “whose members are familiar in some way may in fact be better at pooling information and integrating alternative perspectives than [teams] whose members are not familiar” (Gruenfeld, Mannix, Williams & Neale, 1996). The paradox for managers is obvious – heterogeneity adds diversity but homogeneous teams tend to more effectively integrate information and perspectives. Hence, managers need to consider not only diversity but also the nature of member relationships when selecting staff for teams. One way this could be achieved is by using psychological instruments like MBTI to help select an appropriate mix of personalities within heterogeneous teams, although at this time little research has examined the relationships between personality, compatibility and team performance. At the very least, managers can use personality type information to help understand and manage team problems like conflict and communications. A more popular approach to managing personality within teams is Belbin‟s Team Roles Model. This model supports the value of diversity in thinking to the functioning and decision making effectiveness of teams, highlighting the importance of having team ©Vickers-Willis Corporation 2009

members fulfill nine team roles – Coordinators, Shapers, Plants, Resource Investigators, Implementers, Monitor Evaluators, Team Workers, Completer Finishers and Specialists. The model is not without its critics with one researcher stating “results of these three experiments provide little psychometric support for the structure of Belbin‟s inventories…{suggesting] that the [team roles inventory] as it is designed does not yield reliable, internally consistent scores that are related in the way the theory suggests” (Furnham, Steele & Pendleton, 1993). Another aspect of team composition that can affect team performance and team decisionmaking that I‟d like to highlight is team size. Larger teams of course provide increased diversity although often at a cost to time and also individual participation (i.e. some people can get lost in larger teams). It is often argued that managers should encourage this diversity to overcome the bias of individuals, to improve decision-making. However, people behave differently in groups that often present new decision making problems that need addressing like “group think” and “risky shift” (as will be discussed later). Also, research by Houghton, Simon, Aquino & Goldberg (2000) actually indicates support that adding people to a decision making process by forming a team does not protect against bias, and in fact may increase the bias effect. This they suggest occurs because team mental models result in similar judgment errors that effect individual decision makers. Optimising team size to suit the task at hand is therefore another key management activity.

D. Problem Solving & Team Based Decision Making. The final area is in respect to techniques that leaders can implement to improve problem solving and decision-making within their teams. Encouraging creativity and innovation is a way for leaders to improve the decision making of teams. However, this is not so simple to achieve. According to Williams (2001) there are nine key issues that generally will impact creativity: culture, structure, resource allocation, work group design, job/task design, social support, encouragement, evaluation, and conceptual blocks. The first eight of these issues relate to the environment created by the leader; issues which have already adequately discussed. The last however is elaborated here. Conceptual blocks refers to the inherent mental blocks that artificially constrain creative thinking in humans. An example is hierarchical rational thinking, which is deeply embedded in our typical command and control mental models as discussed by Ashmos and Nathan (2002). Another example of a block is the tendency for people to make personal assumptions like social projection (i.e. misperceiving that one‟s own beliefs, values, abilities and behaviours are more common that they really are) as discussed by Gross & Brodt (2001).

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Many studies like that done by Andersen (2000) are showing that intuition as the dominant decision-making function is related to organisational effectiveness. And so, as a means to counter the dominance of rational thinking and encourage more intuitive thinking many companies are investing in training their employees on becoming more intuitive thinkers to reduce conceptual blocking. Many of the techniques learned in this training can be employed both with individuals and also with teams. Managers can reduce conceptual blocking of their employees in teams by employing various techniques during problem solving. De Bono provides specific techniques for improving lateral thinking through his “6-Hats” methodology (white-facts; red-feelings; black- negatives; yellow-positives; green- new ideas; blue-review). Other more graphic techniques for encouraging lateral thinking include Ishikawa‟s fishbone (cause & effect), Lewin‟s force field (pros & cons) and Venn diagrams (comparisons). Attribute listing is another brainstorming based technique whereby all alternatives/ideas are listed and judgment is deferred. Whilst, synectics is a technique by which managers make the “familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar” and reverse problem definition (eg work backwards from solution). As another means to reducing reliance on rational thinking in business, Mintzberg & Westley (2001) recommended integrating three approaches to improve decision making: thinking first (facts), seeing first (ideas) and doing first (experiences). In order for managers to gain the benefits of team work, they also need to guard against some pitfalls in team functioning – pitfalls occurring because people simply tend to behave differently in groups. Two such problems are referred to as “risky shift” (i.e. where teams are known to make more risky decisions than individuals) and “group think” (i.e. where pressures to conform deters people from expressing differing views). Flippen (1999) suggests that Groupthink (a term coined by Janis in 1972) is the phenomenon that led to faulty decision making over the Bay of Pigs, escalation of the Vietnam War and even complacency over Pearl Harbour. Others have more recently suggested it was responsible for the O-rings fault that caused space shuttle Challenger to explode. Such phenomenon occur because teams are a social situation, where conformity and also dominance are potential behaviours. A further phenomenon is escalating commitment that Whyte (1993) indicates occurs not only for individuals but also in teams. Like creativity, there are various techniques managers can apply to help reduce the risk of these behaviours, including brainstorming and nominal group technique. Houghton (2000) recommends the use of processes like „devils advocacy‟ to help overcome such group tendencies. Clearly leaders need specialised training to learn the skills to help create an environment that encourages creativity and skills to remove the conceptual blocks that limit/constrain

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creative thinking of humans. In addition, there is some evidence to also suggest that employees can be trained in creative thinking capability.

3. Summary

We have described contemporary research and thinking on how managers can improve both team effectiveness and team decision-making. Team leadership, team development, team composition and problem solving and decision making techniques are all areas of key opportunity by which managers can improve the work of teams, which is an essential management competency given the huge reliance by today‟s business on team work. An interesting integrative point for effective team leadership is recognition that the leadership style most commonly associated with the key issues discussed in this paper (ie. of effective managerial communications, using motivational language, and creating spirit and sense of belonging) is transformational leadership – that is, leaders who “use emotional or ideological appeals to change behaviour of the group, moving them from self-interest…to a consideration of the whole group and organisation” (West, Borrill & Unsworth, 1998, p.18). In outlining his model of transformational leaders, Bass (1999) described these leaders as instilling pride and purpose (idealised influence), raising awareness of mission & values (inspirational motivation), treating individuals as important (individualised consideration) and helping people become more innovative and creative (intellectual stimulation). Essentially these leader behaviours instill trust, admiration, loyalty and respect towards the leader, and the employees are motivated to do more than was originally expected. Empowerment of self-managed teams is yet another way by which managers can energise and motivate their workers and their teams; studies have shown that empowering can lead to world-class performance and better customer service. Despite this, there is still much to learn about such process and very few business environments that are practicing it. Empowerment is being resisted by command and control business mental models “Theory X” is not yet dead. Many teams today are failing. The future effectiveness of our business teams is likely to rest on businesses ability to move towards a new paradigm of empowerment. Finally, despite the added complexity of geographical, language and cultural barriers, many of the same principles discussed in this paper also apply to creating effective crossborder teams as discussed by Govindarajan & Gupta (2001).

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