Building Effective Teams in Your Organization
“Teams Are Changing: Are Research and Practice Evolving Fast Enough?”
Scott I. Tannenbaum, John E. Mathieu, Eduardo Salas, Debra Cohen (2012)
What are the researchers interested in?
“We encourage readers [and business managers] to consider how our observations and recommendations compare with their own experiences, identifying parts of similarity and points of departure.”
Historically, researchers have studied the concept of teams and their effectiveness for an organization’s growth and efficiency. Most research assumed that teams possess a few common characteristics: a) teams are stable over time, b) assignment is solely to one team; c) individuals should have common goals; d) job roles are accurately defined; e) well defined and consistent tasks and f) worked in an existing and common location. In the new era of technology and change, we have entered into a state where most teams operate in fluid and dynamic environments compared to the past.
Contemporarily, teams are operating with looser boundaries and are more likely to be geographically dispersed, as such, organizations are more inclined to use teams that are –formed, reconfigured, and sometimes disbanded quickly to combat high priority projects. To this end, researchers have identified that teams are evolving. Research and practices used to promote team effectiveness will need to keep up with its rapid changes.
What method did they use?
The authors will aim to understand how the three themes influence an organization’s effectiveness. In addition, the researchers will advise recommendations to combat these three changes. As practitioners, they will draw from their own experiences and also a series of research literature from the field of I-O psychology.
The three main themes are Dynamic Composition, Technology & Distance, and Empowerment & Delayering.
What did they end up finding?
Dynamic Composition
Vis-à-vis team members with multiple memberships, research has established that members can provide higher levels of knowledge transfer, opposite to static teams. Such membership adjustments will allow for team flexibility and thus be able to make quick adjustments when responding to times of crisis. The power of ‘temporary’ teams lies in the convenience that companies can call members who have experience in a particular industry or project together. Allowing an alignment of Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics (KSAOs) rather than specific job titles.
Technology & Distance
The consequences of technology in businesses are two-fold: One, forms of rich technology have been dominating the working world, from video-conferencing applications to virtual meeting software. Two, teams are becoming more adept at utilizing technology in their daily functioning (collaborative tools, management tools, etc.). The question is – how can companies and teams leverage the power of technology for optimal performance?
Empowerment & Delayering
Allowing greater autonomy to subordinates is not foreign in the literature of organizational behaviour. Organizations understand the benefits of empowering employees and its ability to yield benefits to produce higher self-efficacy and generate enhanced member commitment, and development. Although it is still of essence to understand that there are downfalls of delayering, researchers generally suggest for organizations to identify forms of informal learning (having the intent to learn and gather feedback to reflect upon experiences) in their employees to understand who to keep.
Below we have visualized the suggestions for organizations to help ensure a successful transition to a more autonomous team:
Why does this matter for organizations?
As the researchers note, "the picture we have painted out may have been a chaotic one," with the rapid formation of ‘temporary’ teams and multiple team memberships to members interacting through various forms of technology in different times and places. As a result, organizations should aim to understand the often neglected factors such as trust, shared cognitions, role clarity, and identity. Research has shown that in virtual teams it is difficult – but critical – to establish trust with one another in order to be successful. As teams are becoming more flexible, there will be a larger margin of error in team effectiveness; thus, setting a context by using the key recommendations will allow organizations to effectively utilize the modern-day team designs.
References
Tannenbaum, S. I., Mathieu, J. E., Salas, E., & Cohen, D. (2012). Teams are changing: Are research and practice evolving fast enough?. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 5(1), 2-24.