Teams: Characteristics and Diversity

1. Teams: Characteristics and Diversity 11

2. Learning Goals • What are the five general team types and their defining characteristics? • What are the three general types of team interdependence? • What factors are involved in team composition? • What are the types of team diversity and how do they influence team functioning? • How do team characteristics influence team effectiveness? • How can team compensation be used to manage team effectiveness?

3. Team Characteristics • Ateamconsists of two or more people who work interdependently over some time period to accomplish common goals related to some task-oriented purpose. • A special type of “group.” • The interactions among members within teams revolve around a deeper dependence on one another than the interactions within groups. • The interactions within teams occur with a specific task-related purpose in mind. • OB on Screen • We Are Marshall

4. Team Types • Work teamsare designed to be relatively permanent. • Purpose is to produce goods or provide services, and they generally require a full-time commitment from their members. • Management teamsare designed to be relatively permanent. • Responsible for coordinating the activities of organizational subunits—typically departments or functional areas—to help the organization achieve its long-term goals.

5. Team Types, Cont’d • Parallel teamsare composed of members from various jobs who provide recommendations to managers about important issues that run “parallel” to the organization’s production process. • Project teamsare formed to take on “one-time” tasks that are generally complex and require a lot of input from members with different types of training and expertise. • Action teamsperform tasks that are normally limited in duration. However, those tasks are quite complex and take place in contexts that are either highly visible to an audience or of a highly challenging nature.

6. Table 11-1 Types of Teams

7. Figure 11-1 Types of Teams

8. Variations within Team Types • Virtual teamsare teams in which the members are geographically dispersed, and interdependent activity occurs through electronic communications—primarily e-mail, instant messaging, and Web conferencing.

9. Stages of Team Development • Forming- try to understand the boundaries in the team and get a feel for what is expected of them. • Storming- remain committed to ideas, triggers conflict that affects some relationships and harms the team’s progress. • Norming- realize that they need to work together to accomplish team goals. • Performing-members are comfortable working within their roles, and the team makes progress toward goals. • Adjourning – members experience anxiety and other emotions as they disengage and ultimately separate from the team. Forming Storming Norming Time Performing Adjourning

10. Adapted from Figure 11-2 Punctuated Equilibrium • At the initial team meeting, members make assumptions and establish a pattern of behavior that lasts for the first half of its life.

11. Team Interdependence • Task interdependencerefers the degree to which team members interact with and rely on other team members for the information, materials, and resources needed to accomplish work for the team. • Pooled interdependencerequires lowest degree of required coordination, members complete their work assignments independently, and then this work is simply “piled up” to represent the group’s output.

12. Team Interdependence, Cont’d • Sequential interdependencerequires different tasks to be done in a prescribed order, members interact to carry out their work, the interaction only occurs between members who perform tasks that are next to each other in the sequence.

13. Team Interdependence, Cont’d • Reciprocal interdependencerequires members to be specialized to perform specific tasks. However, instead of a strict sequence of activities, members interact with a subset of other members to complete the team’s work.

14. Team Interdependence, Cont’d • Comprehensive interdependencerequires the highest level of interaction and coordination among members. Each member has a great deal of discretion in terms of what they do and with whom they interact in the course of the collaboration involved in accomplishing the team’s work.

15. Goal Interdependence • A high degree of goal interdependenceexists when team members have a shared vision of the team’s goal and align their individual goals with that vision as a result. • Develop a formalized mission statement that members buy into.

16. Table 11-2 The Mission Statement Development Process

17. Outcome Interdependence • A high degree of outcome interdependenceexists when team members share in the rewards that the team earns. • Pay, bonuses, formal feedback and recognition, pats on the back, extra time off, and continued team survival.

18. Team Composition • Team compositionis the mix of people who make up the team. • Roleis defined as the behaviors a person is expected to display in a given context. • Leader–staff teams- the leader makes decisions for the team and provides direction and control over members who perform assigned tasks. • Team task rolesrefer to behaviors that directly facilitate the accomplishment of team tasks. • Team building rolesrefer to behaviors that influence the quality of the team’s social climate. • Individualistic rolesreflect behaviors that benefit the individual at the expense of the team.

19. Table 11-3 Team and Individualistic Roles

20. Table 11-3 Team and Individualistic Roles, Cont’d

21. Team Composition, Cont’d • Member ability – team members provide a wide array of abilities, both physical and cognitive. • Disjunctive tasks are tasks with an objectively verifiable best solution, and the member who possesses the highest level of the ability relevant to the task will have the most influence on the effectiveness of the team. • Conjunctive tasks are tasks where the team’s performance depends on the abilities of the “weakest link.” • Additive tasksare tasksfor which the contributions resulting from the abilities of every member “add up” to determine team performance.

22. Discussion Questions • Do you think student teams function best in an additive, disjunctive, or conjunctive manner? • What are the advantages and disadvantages of each structure?

23. Team Composition, Cont’d • Member personality - team members possess a wide variety of personality traits. • Agreeable people tend to be more cooperative and trusting, tendencies that promote positive attitudes about the team and smooth interpersonal interactions. • Conscientious people tend to be dependable and work hard to achieve goals. • Extravertedpeople tend to perform more effectively in interpersonal contexts and are more positive and optimistic in general.

24. Team Composition, Cont’d • Team diversity is the degree to which members are different from one another in terms of any attribute that might be used by someone as a basis of categorizing people. • Value in diversity problem-solving approachsaysdiversity is beneficial because it provides for a larger pool of knowledge and perspectives from which a team can draw as it carries out its work. • Similarity-attraction approachsays people tend to be more attracted to others who are perceived as more similar. • Surface-level diversityrefers to diversity regarding observable attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex, and age. • Deep-level diversity refers to diversity with respect to attributes that are less easy to observe initially, but that can be inferred after more direct experience.

25. Team Composition, Cont’d • Team Size • Having a greater number of members is beneficial for management and project teams but not for teams engaged in production tasks. • Research concluded that team members tend to be most satisfied with their team when the number of members is between 4 and 5.

26. Figure 11-4 Five Aspects of Team Composition

27. Figure 11-5 What Characteristics Can Be Used to Describe Teams?

28. How Important Are Team Characteristics? • One aspect of team effectiveness is team performance. • Quantity and quality of goods or services produced, customer satisfaction, completed reports. • A second aspect of team effectiveness is team viability, whichrefers to the likelihood that the team can work together effectively into the future. • The relationship between task interdependence and team performance is moderately positive. • The relationship between task interdependence and team commitment is weaker.

29. Figure 11-6 Effects of Task Interdependence on Performance and Commitment

30. Application: Team Compensation • Outcome interdependence has obvious connections to compensation practices in organizations. • High outcome interdependence promotes higher levels of cooperation because members understand that they share the same fate — if the team wins, everyone wins, and if the team fails, everyone fails. • Design team reward structures with hybrid outcome interdependence, which means that members receive rewards that are dependent on both their team’s performance and how well they perform as individuals.

31. Takeaways • Teams are comprised of two or more people who work interdependently over some time period to accomplish common goals related to some task-oriented purpose. Teams are more interdependent and task focused than groups. • There are several different types of teams—work teams, management teams, parallel teams, project teams, and parallel teams—but many teams in organizations have characteristics that fit in multiple categories and differ from one another in other ways. • Teams can be interdependent in terms of the team task, goals, and outcomes. Each type of interdependence has important implications for team functioning and effectiveness.

32. Takeaways, Cont’d • Team composition refers to the characteristics of the members who work in the team. These characteristics include roles, ability, and personality, as well as the number of team members. • Depending on the team’s task, it may be important to consider the average ability of the members, the ability of the most able, or the ability of the least able. • The effect of diversity on the team depends on time and whether the diversity is surface-level or deep-level. The effects of surface-level diversity tend to diminish with time, whereas the effects of deep-level diversity tend to increase over time.

33. Takeaways, Cont’d • Task interdependence has a moderate positive relationship with team performance and a weak relationship with team commitment. • Outcome interdependence has important effects on teams, which can be managed with compensation practices that take team performance into account.