Using the information that you have retrieved through your study of the articles and videos in Module 7, plus your own experience working in teams and post your response to the following instructions:

You have processed a lot of information to date in this Module. You might be experiencing selective attention or information overload.

• Are there any key terms that are new to you and make sense when understanding the team process?
• Have you ever been in a team that has not worked well and how might you explain that in terms of what you have learned in this Module?

Module Information

Key Terms and Concepts

Team

A group of two or more people that perceive themselves as a social entity and that: exist to fulfill a purpose that are interdependent,interact and influence each other, and are mutually accountable for achieving common goals and perceive themselves as a social entity.

Grapevine

The process of sharing information informally with employees.

Process Losses

The amount of time and resources required by an organization to focus on team development and maintenance rather than on the task itself.

Brooks' Law

A law that states that the team will slow down more as process losses add up as the team reconfigures to include new team members.

Social Loafing

Occurs when people in teams exert less effort than when working alone

Fault Lines

Refers to teams splitting into different sub-groups with different agendas and priorities.

Norms

Informal rules and shared expectations a team establishes to regulate member behavior

Production Blocking

The time it takes in a group/team to manage the process of team communication

Evaluation Apprehension

The reluctance to express your ideas in a team meeting in case your team members evaluate you negatively

Groupthink

A team values consensus rather than quality decision making.

Escalation of Commitment

Occurs when cohesive teams continue to invest time and money into a decision even after the decision has been proven to not be functional.

Working in a team-based organization structure is not uncommon within organizations.

Therefore, in this role-play, your organization is following a growing trend with the shift to a team-based structure.

READING

As you review this 2016 Deloitte study pertaining to the team-based organizational structure, note key evidence of the growing trend towards moving away from traditional organizational structures.

THE RISE OF THE TEAM

An important statistic in the Deloitte study is that 38% of companies and 24% of large companies (>50,000 employees) have moved away from traditional functional structures towards dynamic networks of teams, which is a strong indicator that organizations are seeing value in teams. Given that the Deloitte study was done in 2016, it is likely that the percentages are even higher today.

Your next task in your HR role, is to define exactly what a team is, and what the differences and similarities are between a group and a team.

https://youtu.be/5uZaB9g2udg

Watch This

Review the following video.

Flag what you feel to be the key elements of what defines a group and a team.

What do you see as the important distinctions that separate the two?

VIDEO LINK

If you build on what you saw in the video, a team is typically defined as:

• Groups of two or more people
• Exist to fulfill a purpose
• Interdependent - interact and influence each other
• Mutually accountable for achieving common goals
• Perceive themselves as a social entity

The key points in this definition are that team members interact and influence each other and are mutually accountable for achieving common goals.

In other words, team members share an interdependence which group members typically do not. A group of people having lunch every day or enjoying a social activity does not constitute a team as each group member does not have to rely on each other to achieve their goals.

Team members, especially in a cohesive team, also identify themselves as being a part of the team. In Module 5, you learned the concept of social identity and how people may partially define who they are by the groups to which the belong. In your organization, for example, you may hear people describe themselves as being a part of the management or the HR team.

In fact, organizations may even create special work teams and generate names such as the "A-Team" or the "Star Team" to increase the attraction of being a team member.

Given the definition of team, how many teams do you belong to that will fit into that definition?

You will be working as part of a team in this course on your team assignment. Do you think your team will meet the above definition?

Advantages and Disadvantages of Teams

So far in this module, there is a general impression that a team-based organizational structure is the direction that organizations should be going. Well, it is important to acknowledge that there are also disadvantages to this team approach.

READING

Review the following article and identify 3 of the most important advantages and disadvantages of using a team approach to meeting organizational objectives.

18 BIGGEST ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF TEAMWORK

https://vittana.org/18-biggest-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-teamwork

It can likely be said that under the right conditions, teams can make better decisions, develop better products, and create a more engaged workplace compared with employees working alone.

Can you think of a situation when teams are not as effective as individuals working alone?

Perhaps one person might have all the skills required to the task or the task itself cannot be easily broken done into parts or there are very tight deadlines to get the task completed.

One reality of using a team to solve problems and to make decisions is that a team need time to develop and mature before it can move to the action stage. Here are some realities of creating and maintaining a team through to the stated objectives.

TERMS (Taken from Gaille Video)

Process Losses

Process Losses is the amount of time and resources required by an organization to focus on team development and maintenance rather than on the task itself. It is safe to say that a newly formed team is not likely to be effective in decision making or problem solving if there is a severe time deadline.

Brooks' Law

A common error made by organizations is to add new members to a team that is running late on a project to move the team at a faster pace. Brooks' Law states that the team will slow down more as process losses add up as the team reconfigures to include the new team members

Social Loafing

Occurs when people in teams exert less effort than when working alone. One potential situation for social loafing to occur is in the team assignment for courses like this one if individual performance is not measured within the team, resulting in everyone getting the same reward regardless of the amount of effort put in by any student. So, while we typically think of social loafing as being a product of a large team, the reward systems in place within the team is also a factor in whether social loafing will occur.

What do you see yourself doing to minimize social loafing in teams that you have put together?

Make Individual Performance More Visible

• Form smaller teams
• Specialize tasks
• Measure individual performance

Increase Employee Motivation

• Increase job enrichment
• Select motivated employees

For the team assignment in this course, for example, marks can be assigned based on the results of peer evaluations, and individual students within the group may have individual scores adjusted, based on the rankings of the other team members.

In the next section, you are going to explore conditions contributing to team effectiveness.

How to Support Team Effectiveness

When time and effort create a team to solve an organizational problem, you want to make sure that all the structures are in place to support and maintain the team, until objectives have been met. You want your team to be effective.

An effective team:

• Achieves its objectives
• Helps individual team members to fulfil their needs
• Can maintain the commitment of its members so that the team does not fall apart.

Recall the MARS Model that you learned in a previous module. The MARS Model indicates that successful voluntary behaviour is driven by four factors i.e., Motivation, Abilities, Role Perception and Situational factors. If even one of these factors are out of alignment, we can predict that the hoped-for behaviour and/or outcome will not be achieved. The MARS Model is very relevant to predicting the effectiveness of teams.

The following model examines several factors needing to be in place to ensure the probability of team effectiveness.

Like the MARS model, if even one of these variables is misaligned, the probability of the team being effective, drops.

The Team and the Environment

Teams tend to work more effectively when the environment in which the team is located, is supportive and conducive to team development and maintenance. Some of the key elements in a supportive environment include:

• Rewards
• Communication
• Organizational Structure
• Organizational Leadership
• Physical Space

The organization must have a reward system in place that recognizes and rewards team behaviour and participation. Since collective agreements do not typically include language that rewards teamwork, a unionized workplace that manages rewards solely based on the collective agreement will not contain ways to reward teamwork. One common occurrence is for an organization to shift to the team approach without realigning its reward systems to support the team processes.

REFLECTION

Consider an organization that you are familiar with. Consider how conducive its environment is to supporting team effectiveness. What might the organization have to change in order to make for a more supportive environment?

The next consideration for team effectiveness has to do with the design of the team itself.

Team Design Factors

One of the first tasks in the development of a team in the workplace, is to be aware of several key elements in the design of the team itself.

If the wrong team design is used to work on an organizational issue, team effectiveness may suffer.

The first element of team design is the amount of interdependence the team members will have on each other, to accomplish the team objective. The level of interdependence will range from low to high according to the tasks required.

Independence	Team Type	Examples
High	Reciprocal	A team works together on a highly interdependent task such as a team working in an operating room
Medium	Sequential	An assembly line where on order to do your job you have to rely on someone else to complete his task.
Low	Pooled	You work independently but you are part of a group that shares a common resource like a photocopier or admin support

Depending on the level of interdependence the team will be working under, the structures in place might have to be different. In other words, the potential for conflict might be lower in a pooled level of interdependence, than in a reciprocal level.

Why do you think that might be?

And here is a question that you will likely be asked when developing a team-based structure at work i.e., how large should the team be, to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness?" You will sometimes see where authors attempt to give "the" best size for a team, but that this element is like a riddle; there is no easy or absolute response.

• Smaller teams are better because they:
  • Need less time to coordinate roles and resolve differences
  • Require less time to develop more member involvement
• The most accurate response to the question is that teams must be large enough to accomplish the assigned tasks in a timely fashion and with the desired level of quality.

As important as it to consider the number of people on a team, it is also crucial to know whether potential team members are bringing the required team competencies. In other words, it is great that someone expresses an interest in working on a team, but an organization must also be strategic in choosing the right fit between team members and the task at hand.

Typical team competencies such as cooperating, coordinating, communicating, comforting and conflict resolving assist in the effectiveness of the team. The team member selection process can include searching for members with the required competencies or training on the desired competencies can be given to selected team members.

The action of either selecting team members with the desired competencies or training members in competencies takes time and energy and, therefore, fits under the process losses category learned earlier in this lesson. Compare that optimum situation with the reality that often teams are filled with people who have expressed an interest and/or who have been "voluntold" that they will be on the team. The lack of strategically choosing suitable team members can have a significant influence on the overall effectiveness of the team.

In Module 2 you learned the term "mental model" to refer to the process that we use to see and understand the world around us. When you are putting together a team, you have a decision to make regarding the mental models that team members are bringing with them to the team.

SCENARIO

Here is a challenge for you to consider. You are the HR Manager in a small but rapidly growing IT organization. You currently have 75 employees, but the projections indicate that in the next two years, the organization will grow to 200.

You have been tasked by senior management to form a team that will examine a key organizational priority of introducing Artificial Intelligence into the organization. Your team will come up with a series of recommendations to present back to senior management.

You must make some decisions in terms of team design.

• What size of team would you like to put together?
• What factors should you consider in terms of the level of team interdependence?
• Should the team members bring with them a common mental model of the situation?
• Do you want to build a team from across all departments in the organization to bring in different perspectives to the team?

Remember that in Module 1, you learned that our course was the "it depends" course, and this is definitely one of those times when the term "it depends" applies. For the most part, if the objective of the team is to work on a task requiring a high level of cooperation and working on a short time frame, then the team members should likely be homogenous in terms of their mental models, skills, values and experience within the organization. As an example, if the objective of the team is to engage in corporate citizenship by raising money for the local foodbank, then having a team comprised of employees with a high level of cooperation might be a good choice.

If the team task is to work on a complex problem requiring innovative solutions, then a team from several different departments with different mental models and experiences may very well give you a larger range of ideas and perspectives.

Teams composed of employees from different departments do not come without their special set of challenges, including higher process losses, fault lines and higher potential for conflict.

In module two you learned about fault lines. The "fault lines" in team structure refers to teams splitting into different sub-groups with different agendas and priorities in a team with different training and professional backgrounds. (Module 2-Communications)

For instance, team members representing the manufacturing department might bring their own priorities to team discussions rather than working as a whole team. And while the multi-faceted team has the potential for solving complex problems and generating great alternatives, the team leader in a multi-faceted team must be skilled in conflict resolution and managing the team processes.

Your next topic in terms of team effectiveness considers the predictable development process for teams and the impact that path might have on effectiveness.

Team Development

Teams develop at predictable steps and speed---which suggests that trying to rush a team to action might have some consequences on the quality of the team problem-solving and decision making.

Watch This

As you watch this excellent video pertaining to team development, make note of the five different stages and also consider what issues and challenges might be found in each stage.

VIDEO LINK

https://youtu.be/Eq-4kZ5IVGY

Several key points were made in the video.

Team development consists of five different stages

1. Forming
2. Storming
3. Norming
4. Performing
5. Adjourning

It is worth pointing out that teams tend to cycle through the various stages of development, and will return to a previous stage if something significant happens in the team. The video also points out that every team goes through the stages at different speeds.

A diverse team will likely go through the stages of team development at a slower rate than will a team whose members share a common mental model.

For instance, team members who are skilled or experienced in team processes may move through the development stages more quickly than members who are new to working in a team.

You have previously learned the concept of Brooks' Law, and it can be applied to team development. The introduction of a new team member or the departure of a team member is likely to have a serious effect on the team development process. Teams may revert to an earlier stage in team development as the composition of the team has changed.

It is important to understand that the focus of the first three stages of team development i.e. the forming, storming, and norming stages, is primarily directed at team processes rather than on task completion.

The adjourning stage is also a team process stage, as the team has completed the assigned team task and energies are now directed on shutting the team down. If the team is very cohesive, this might be very difficult for team members. Recall that you learned the concept of social identity where a person might associate membership in a team with who they are as a person. The adjournment state of the team development might be quite hard for a person who has been strongly attached to the team.

Given this knowledge of team processes, what specifically could you do as a team leader to assist a team move through the forming, storming, and norming stages of team development?

DISCUSSION

You have processed a lot of information to date in this module. You might be experiencing selective attention or information overload.

Go to discussion and discuss with your colleagues what you have learned so far about teams.

Are there any key terms that are new to you and make sense when understanding the team process?

Have you ever been in a team that has not worked well; how might you explain that in terms of what you have learned so far?