Working in Teams

American Express's David House knows that working in teams and small groups puts people's communication skills to the test. A team is a unit of two or more people who work together to achieve a goal. Team members have a shared mission and are collectively responsible for their work.²

Team members may be responsible for writing reports, giving oral presentations, and attending meetings. Whether the goal is to solve a problem, monitor a process, or investigate an opportunity, team members must communicate effectively among themselves and with people outside their team. Thus companies are looking for people who can interact successfully in teams and make useful contributions while working together. Some companies even base pay raises and promotions on an employee's effectiveness as a team player.

In a recent survey of Fortune 1000 executives, 83 percent said their firms are working in teams or moving in that direction.³ Why are teams so important in today's workplace? One reason is performance. A recent study of 232 organizations across 16 countries and more than 8 industries revealed that organizations working in teams experience the highest improvement in performance.⁴ Another reason is creativity. Teams encourage creativity in workers through participative management, involving employees in the company's decision making. At Kodak, for example, using teams has allowed the company to reduce by 50 percent the amount of time it takes to move a new product from the drawing board to store shelves.⁵

The type, structure, and composition of individual teams vary within an organization. Companies can create formal teams that become part of the organization's structure, or they may establish informal teams, which aren't part of the formal organization but are formed to solve a problem, work on a specific activity, or encourage employee participation

Problem-solving teams and task forces are informal teams that assemble to resolve specific issues and disband once their goal has been accomplished. Team members often include representatives of many departments so that those who have a stake in the outcome are allowed to provide input.⁶ When Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, established a task force to find ways to reduce the cost of supplies, team members came from departments such as surgery, laboratory, nursing, financial planning, administration, and food service. This cross-department team not only helped the hospital save money by curbing supply waste but also generated excitement among hospital employees about working together for common goals.⁷

In contrast to problem-solving teams and task forces, a committee usually has a long life span and may become a permanent part of the organizational structure. Committees typically deal with regularly recurring tasks. For example, a grievance committee may be formed as a permanent resource for handling employee complaints and concerns.

Virtual teams bring together geographically distant employees to accomplish goals. A company may have plants and offices around the world, but it can use computer networks, teleconferencing, e-mail, and global transportation to build teams that are as effective as those in organizations functioning under a single roof. At British Petroleum, for example, virtual teams link workers in the Gulf of Mexico with teams working in the eastern Atlantic and around the globe. By using a virtual team network, the company decreased the number of helicopter trips to offshore oil platforms, avoided refinery shutdowns (because technical experts at other locations were able to handle problems remotely), and experienced a significant reduction in construction rework, among other benefits.⁸

Teams can play a vital role in helping an organization reach its goals. However, they are not appropriate for every situation. When deciding whether to use teams, managers must weigh both the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.⁹

At their best, teams can be an extremely useful forum for making key decisions. The interaction of the participants leads to good decisions based on the combined intelligence of the group. An organization's decision making can benefit from the team approach in the following ways:¹⁰

•	Increased information and knowledge. By aggregating the resources of several individuals, teams bring more information to the decision process.

•	Increased diversity of views. Teams bring many different perspectives to the decision process.

•	Increased acceptance of a solution. Team members who participate in making a decision are more likely to enthusiastically support the decision and encourage others to accept it. Because they share in the final product, they are committed to seeing it succeed.

Teams generally achieve performance levels that exceed what would have been accomplished had the members worked independently, perhaps because teams have the potential to unleash vast amounts of creativity and energy in workers. Motivation and performance are often increased because workers share a sense of purpose and mutual accountability. Teams can also fill the individual worker's need to belong to a group. Furthermore, they can reduce employee boredom, increase feelings of dignity and self-worth, and reduce stress and tension between workers.

Although teamwork has many advantages, it also has a number of potential disadvantages. At their worst, teams are unproductive and frustrating, and they waste everyone's time. Some may actually be counterproductive, because they may arrive at bad decisions. For instance, when people are pressured to conform, they may abandon their sense of personal responsibility and agree to ill-founded plans. Similarly, a team may develop groupthink, the willingness of individual members to set aside their personal opinions and go along with everyone else, even if everyone else is wrong, simply because belonging to the team is more important to them than making the right decision. Groupthink can lead to poor-quality decisions and ill-advised actions, even inducing people to act unethically.

Some team members may have a hidden agenda—private motives that affect the group's interaction. Sam might want to prove that he's more powerful than Sherry; Sherry might be trying to share the risk of making a decision; and Don might be looking for a chance to postpone doing "real" work. Each person's hidden agenda can detract from the team's effectiveness.

And the potential disadvantages don't stop there. Free riders are team members who don't contribute their fair share to the group's activities because they aren't being held individually accountable for their work. The free-ride attitude can lead to certain tasks going unfulfilled. Still another drawback to teamwork is the high cost of coordinating group activities. Aligning schedules, arranging meetings, and coordinating individual parts of a project can eat up a lot of time and money. Finally, teams simply aren't effective for all situations. As management guru Peter Drucker puts it, "When the ship goes down, you don't call a meeting. The captain gives an order or everybody drowns."¹¹

The interactions and processes that take place in a team are called group dynamics. Some teams are more effective than others simply because the dynamics of the group facilitate member input and the resolution of differences. To keep things moving forward, productive teams also tend to develop rules that are conducive to business. Often these rules are unstated; they just become standard group practice, or norms—informal standards of conduct that members share and that guide member behavior. For example, there may be an unspoken agreement that it's okay to be 10 minutes late for meetings but not 15 minutes late.

When a team has a strong identity, the members observe team rules religiously: They're upset by any deviation and feel a great deal of pressure to conform. This loyalty can be positive, giving members a strong commitment to one another and highly motivating them to see that the team succeeds. However, an overly strong identity could lead to negative conditions such as groupthink.

Members of a team can play various roles, which fall into three categories (see Table 2–1). Members who assume self-oriented roles are motivated mainly to fulfill personal needs, so they tend to be less productive than other members. Far more likely to contribute to team goals are those members who assume team-maintenance roles to help everyone work well together and those members who assume task-facilitating roles to help solve problems or make decisions.

Table 2–1  Team Roles People Play  Self-Oriented Roles Team-Maintenance Roles Task-Facilitating Roles Controlling: dominating others by exhibiting superiority or authority Withdrawing: retiring from the team either by becoming silent or by refusing to deal with a particular aspect of the team’s work Attention seeking: calling attention to oneself and demanding recognition from others Diverting: focusing the team’s discussion on topics of interest to the individual rather than on those relevant to the task Encouraging: drawing out other members by showing verbal and nonverbal support, praise, or agreement Harmonizing: reconciling differences among team members through mediation or by using humor to relieve tension Compromising: offering to yield on a point in the interest of reaching a mutually acceptable decision Initiating: getting the team started on a line of inquiry Information giving or seeking: offering (or seeking) information relevant to questions facing the team Coordinating: showing relationships among ideas, clarifying issues, summarizing what the team has done Procedure setting: suggesting decisionmaking procedures that will move the team toward a goal

To a great extent, the roles that individuals assume in a group depend on their status in that group and their reasons for joining the group. Status depends on many variables, including personal attractiveness, competence in a particular field, past successes, education, age, social background, and organizational position. A person's status also varies from team to team. In most teams, as people try to establish their relative status, an undercurrent of tension can get in the way of the real work. Until roles and status have stabilized, a team may have trouble accomplishing its goals.

While teams grow and evolve in their own ways, research shows that most teams typically reach a decision by passing through five phases:¹²

•	Orientation. Team members socialize, establish their roles, and begin to define their task or purpose.

•	Conflict. Team members begin to discuss their positions and become more assertive in establishing their roles. If members have been carefully selected to represent a variety of viewpoints and expertise, disagreements are a natural part of this phase.

•	Brainstorm. Team members air all the options and discuss the pros and cons fully. At the end of this phase, members begin to settle on a single solution to the problem.

•

Emergence. Team members reach a decision. Consensus is reached when the team finds a solution that is acceptable enough for all members to support (even if they have reservations). This consensus happens only after all members have had an opportunity to communicate their positions and feel that they have been listened to.

•	Reinforcement. Group feeling is rebuilt and the solution is summarized. Members receive their assignments for carrying out the group's decision, and they make arrangements for following up on those assignments.

These five phases almost always occur regardless of what task or what type of decision is being considered. Moreover, team members naturally use this process, even when they lack experience or training in team communication.