Building, Leading & Managing Teams - PowerPoint Presentation

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Building, Leading & Managing Teams

Management Level – Paper E2Project and Relationship Management

Lecture - 023

Vidya

Rajawasam

ACMA CGMA MBA

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Managing Teams

In the previous lecture, we have discuss about the The meaning of groups and teams

The types of groups Effectiveness of group performanceFormation and development

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Managing Teams

In this lecture, we will discuss about the Group cohesiveness Team rolesGroup dynamics and team performance

High performance teams Problems with groups

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Managing Teams

Group cohesiveness There are a number of factors which affect the integration of organizational and individual objectives in groups, and hence the cohesiveness of the group. They include:

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Managing Teams

Group cohesiveness Membership factors● Homogeneity. Similarity of members is preferred for simple tasks; it leads to easier working but less creative problem-solving. A variety of skills and knowledge is more effective for complex tasks. Homogeneity of status, both internally and externally, leads to a more cohesive group.

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Managing Teams

Group cohesiveness Membership factors● Alternatives. If the individual has alternatives, that is he or she can leave the group easily, his or her dependence on the group is reduced. Similarly, if turnover of membership is high, the group will tend to lack cohesion. Management may, of course, deliberately keep changing the membership of awkward groups.

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Managing Teams

Group cohesiveness Membership factors ● Size of group. The importance of this factor depends on the nature of the particular task.

Groups solve problems more quickly and effectively than individuals, but one should also consider cost-effectiveness

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Managing Teams

Group cohesiveness Membership factors ● Size of group.

As the size of the group goes up, the average productivity of the members goes down; there is less opportunity to participate; individuals ’ contributions are less discernible; cliques or factions may form; less work is done; and ‘ social loafing ’ or ‘ social noise ’ may increase.

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Managing Teams

Group cohesiveness Membership factors ● Membership in other groups. This may detract from cohesion and effectiveness.

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Managing Teams

Environmental factors ● Task: the nature of the task and its organisation must be compatible. ● Isolation of the group: external threat and incentives.

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Managing Teams

Environmental factors ● The climate of management and leadership: a Theory X type of organisation tends to lead to anti-management groups forming, even if only informally. Leadership style should be appropriate to the task, as we have seen before.

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Managing Teams

Dynamic factors ● Groups are continually changing, not just in membership but also in understanding each other and of the task. ● Success and failure, there is a tendency to persist in failure.

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Managing Teams

Team roles A role is a social predisposition to certain ways of behaviour related to the perception of an individual to his or her status (position, occupation). Hence, the status of being a mother carries with it the role of ‘ mother ’ and attendant behaviors. Marital status produces the roles of husband and wife, and so on. These roles are learned implicitly from the expectations of others.

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Managing Teams

Team roles Group roles are those functions which a group needs for it to survive (someone to organize social events, a joker, a serious adviser, and so on). These are very often implicit and develop spontaneously, but these roles need not emerge among groups of same-status individuals (called ‘ peers ’ in sociology), such as a group of police constables, a safety committee, consultative committee or quality circle, though social roles might arise as one person volunteers to make the tea, another to collect monies for the lottery.

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Managing Teams

Team roles A popular categorization of team roles has been developed by Belbin (1981) . From his own personality research, using Cattell’s

16PF scale, Belbin found that ‘ the Apollo team ’ – the brightest individuals at the management college – was the worst performing in business games.

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Managing Teams

Team roles From there he realized that the personalities of the individuals mitigated against them acting together and he developed eight, then nine, key roles (these do not all have to be played by different individuals), each associated with different sets of personality traits that are important in an effective management team:

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Managing Teams

Team roles ● Coordinator – who clarifies the group’s objectives and helps to identify the issues to be addressed; individuals who prefer this role tend to be stable, dominant extroverts. ●

Shaper – needs results for reassurance and has a compulsive drive to get things done; the key traits here are those of an anxious, dominant extrovert.

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Managing Teams

Team roles ● Monitor evaluator – is good at dispassionate analysis of suggestions and options; a stable, introverted type of individual with a high IQ. ● Implementer – who turns decisions into manageable tasks; stable, controlled individual.

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Managing Teams

Team roles ● Resource investigator – this is the person who goes outside the group to obtain useful information and resources; a dominant, stable extrovert usually performs this role well. ●

Expert/specialist – technical person, if needed, who provides knowledge and skills to solve technically based problems.

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Managing Teams

Team roles If there is not the right balance of team roles, work will not be performed effectively. This balance is particularly important for groups operating in ill-defined, rapidly changing environments. More stable groups may be able to operate without a fully balanced set of roles.

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Review MCQs

What are the factors affecting group cohesiveness ? Employee / employer relations ships Size of the group. Employee controls and their remuneration .

Non of the above

Managing Teams

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Review MCQs

What are the factors affecting group cohesiveness ? Employee / employer relations ships Size of the group.

Employee controls and their remuneration . Non of the above

Managing Teams

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Review MCQs

The following points are part of part of the team roles ? Coordinator role Bureaucratic controls

Competitive controls Non of the above

Managing Teams

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Review MCQs

The following points are part of the team roles ? Coordinator role

Bureaucratic controls Competitive controls Non of the above

Managing Teams

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Managing Teams

Group dynamics and team performance In a group, there is a high level of mutual interaction and awareness which are responsible for powerful forces, which cause the individual to behave, sometimes, rather differently from the way they would behave on their own. It is important to the organisation that these forces work for the organisation and not against it. Several classic experiments illustrate these forces.

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Managing Teams

Group dynamics and team performance Performance of simple, well-learned routines improves in the presence of an audience , or in co-action or in competition with others. Performance of complex or new tasks, on the other hand, is poorer in the presence of an audience.

Zajonc has suggested that this can be explained in terms of the relationship between arousal and performance, such that audiences can induce over-arousal and hence anxiety in complex tasks.

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Managing Teams

Group dynamics and team performance Steiner has identified four basic models of group functioning: 1. An additive model in which every individual contributes but no one is dependent on anyone else. The total output in theory depends on the average skill or ability, but in practice it is found to fall short. This loss of efficiency increases with the size of the group and may be either motivational or intersectional.

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Managing Teams

Group dynamics and team performance Steiner has identified four basic models of group functioning: 1. An additive model in which every individual contributes but no one is dependent on

anyone else. The total output in theory depends on the average skill or ability, but in practice it is found to fall short. This loss of efficiency increases with the size of the group and may be either motivational or intersectional.

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Managing Teams

Group dynamics and team performance 2. A coordination or conjunctive model in which there is a high, and often sequential, dependence between members, as in assembly lines or highly differentiated forms of office work.

Overall performance of the team is here dependent on the weakest member. The smaller and more homogeneous the team, the more efficient the team performance. Though interaction losses will still occur, they will be less than in the additive case, because there is less opportunity for interaction in a linear model.

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Managing Teams

Group dynamics and team performance 3. A collaboration or disjunctive model applies to things like problem-solving, where the group performance should be close to that of the most competent member, that is better than that of the average member.

Group size should therefore be as small as possible, consistent with having all the necessary range of skills available, in order to reduce interaction losses. Groups should be heterogeneous to provide these skills and to reduce any tendency towards unproductive group norms. A well-established or homogeneous group may tend to work towards agreement rather than towards an optimum solution.

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Managing Teams

Group dynamics and team performance 4. A complementary model applies where the task can be divided into separate parts and different skills are needed for each.

Variations and combinations of the above may be appropriate to meet different circumstances, for example small conjunctive teams working in parallel to feed a key worker or function such as inspection or packing. Also, different structures may be appropriate at different stages, so a large committee of many diverse skills may be appropriate to solving a problem (disjunctive), but a small homogeneous subgroup more appropriate for actioning the solution.

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Managing Teams

High-performance teamsAccording to Vaill (1989) , high-performance teams exhibit the following characteristics: ● They perform excellently against a known external standard, and what they did before. ● They perform beyond what is assumed to be their potential best.

● They are judged by informed observers to be substantially better than comparable groups.

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Managing Teams

High-performance teams ● They achieve results with fewer resources than are assumed necessary. ● They are seen to be exemplars, achieving the ideals of the culture.

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Managing Teams

High-performance teams at Digital Equipment in Scotland Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) started to develop high-performance work systems around empowered teams at its manufacturing plant in Ayr, on the west coast of Scotland, in the early 1980s. These teams were responsible for the manufacture of the company’s range of small business computers, and had the following features:

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Managing Teams

High-performance teams at Digital Equipment in Scotland ● Autonomous teams of six to twelve employees were self-managing and self-organizing, functioning without first-line supervision. ● Each team had full ‘ front to back ’ responsibility for a whole section of the manufacturing process, such as assembling a complete printed circuit board.

● Teams negotiated their production targets with their product manager, based on available staff, materials and equipment. ● Team members were expected to share their skills with each other to become multi skilled, and had no job titles.

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Managing Teams

High-performance teams at Digital Equipment in Scotland ● Team members were paid according to their skill level and not according to the particular job on which they were working at any one time. ● Team members were involved in the performance appraisal of colleagues and in the selection procedure for new recruits.● The physical layout of the factory floor was open to facilitate communications; technical support staff had their ‘

offi ces ’ and desks on the shop-floor too.

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Managing Teams

Problems with groups Unfortunately groups can also have negative as well as positive effects. Subsequent research has identified a number of these negative effects, some of which are discussed below.

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Managing Teams

Conformity Individuals can be persuaded by group pressures to agree with decisions which are demonstrably and obviously wrong, and which the person must know to be wrong. Overall, some 74 per cent of his subjects conformed to an incorrect decision at least once, and the average level of conformity was 32 per cent. The combination of wrongness and unanimity takes members by surprise, shakes confi

dence and disorients judgment. If the group is not unanimous, then the spell is broken and normal judgment largely restored. In the Asch experiment, this was demonstrated if one confederate was briefed to break ranks, when average conformity dropped from 32 to 6 per cent.

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Managing Teams

Groupthink This is a word coined by Irving Janis (1972, Victims of Groupthink ) to describe a common situation which he observed to have occurred within tightly-knit political groups. After the initial ‘ Bay of Pigs ’ disaster, when the United States encouraged an abortive ‘ invasion ’ of Cuba via the Bay of Pigs, John F Kennedy saw clearly how to try to avoid ‘ groupthink ’ and planned his leadership accordingly by insisting on:

● critical evaluation of alternatives; ● independent sub-groups to work on solutions; ● external testing of proposed solutions;

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Managing Teams

Groupthink ● the leader to avoid domination of the group (which can be unconscious); ● the avoidance of stereotypes of the opposition. Groupthink could be described simply as the homogeneity of objectives and thinking carried to the ultimate, and often disastrous, extreme.

The attitude is well summarized in the more recent example of the space-shuttle disaster. To quote The Guardian : ‘ NASA argued that the ‘‘ gung-ho, can-do ” ethic which guided the space agency made it difficult to raise concern about the safety of the O-ring seals. ’

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Review MCQs

Steiner has identified four basic models of group functioning and one of those are ? Additive model Organizational model

Tactical model Non of the above.

Managing Teams

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Review MCQs

Steiner has identified four basic models of group functioning and one of those are ? ? Additive model Organizational model

Tactical model Non of the above.

Managing Teams

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Review MCQs

What is true related to high performance teams? Average levels of remuneration No room for RedundancyThey perform beyond what is assumed to be their potential best.

Demotion

Managing Teams

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Review MCQs

What is true related to high performance teams? Average levels of remuneration No room for RedundancyThey perform beyond what is assumed to be their potential best.

Demotion

Managing Teams

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Managing Teams

Lecture Summary We have discussed theGroup cohesiveness

Team rolesGroup dynamics and team performance High performance teams Problems with groups

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Building, Leading & Managing Teams

Management Level – Paper E2Project and Relationship Management

Lecture - 023

Vidya

Rajawasam

ACMA CGMA MBA