A group must have two or more members who come together to achieve particular objectives.

True or False

Informal groups are alliances that are formal in nature and organizationally determined.

True or False

Command and task groups are limited to its immediate hierarchical superior.

True or False

Different groups provide different benefits to their members

True or False

We often experience role conflict when compliance with one role requirement makes it difficult to comply with another.

True or False

The conclusions drawn from the Asch studies suggest that there are group norms that press us to conformity in group situations.

True or FAlse

Deviant workplace behavior decreases when we act independently as opposed to working in groups.

True or False

Status is seen as a socially defined position or rank given to groups or group members by others and impacts all societies

True or False

Evaluations of recent studies indicate that electronic meetings have had an adverse impact on group effectiveness.

True or False

Money was less a factor in determining worker output than were group standards, sentiments, and security

Level of conformity has
declined since 1950’s

Cultural differences affect status

Strengths

Efficiency – groups are generally less efficient

- A clear group identity exists - Members hold a positive image of their group that they want to protect - The group perceives a collective threat to this positive image

Group vs. Teams

What's the difference?

Note:  All teams are groups; not all groups are teams!

 Work Group:  Interacts primarily to share information and make decisions to help each group member perform within his or her area of responsibility.

Work Team:  Coordinates effort to create “synergy” -- where the resulting  performance (output) is greater than the sum of the individual inputs (parts).

Work Groups                                                       Work Team

Share Information          <-Goal->   Collective Performance

  Neutral (sometimes negative)     <-Synergy->             Positive

    Individual              <-Accountability->           Individual & mutual

Random & Varied           <-Skills->                    Complementary

 Problem-Solving Teams: Comprised of 5 to 12 employees, often  from the same department, who meet for a few hours each week to discuss ways of improving quality, efficiency, and the work environment.

Self-Managed Work Teams: Comprised of 10 to 15 people who take on the responsibilities of their former supervisors.

Cross-Functional Teams:  Employees from about the same hierarchical level, but from different work areas, who come together to accomplish a task (e.g., exchange info, generate ideas, solve a problem, coordinate complex projects). (ex:task force, committees)

Virtual Teams:  Use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members in order to achieve a common goal.

1) the absence of paraverbal and nonverbal cues

2) A limited social context

3) the ability to overcome time and space constraints

Team Diagnosis:

Only four things can go wrong with a team

1) Goal Issues:  purpose of the team in the organization’s mission; the specific goal of the team.

2) Role Issues: understanding the roles of members; specifying help from members; leadership function.

3) Procedural Issues:  operating methods (e.g., decision-making, project format, problem-solving, conflict resolution, etc.); involvement of all members.

4) Interpersonal Issues:  feelings of trust, support, and communication; interdependence of members; strong group ties (cohesiveness). 

Inclues 4 Categories:

1) Context:  Adequate resources; leadership and structure; climate of trust; performance evaluation and reward systems

2) Composition:  abilities of members; personality; allocating roles; diversity; size of teams; member flexibility; member preferences

3) Work Design: autonomy; skill variety; task identity; task significance

4) Process: common purpose; specific goals; team efficacy; conflict levels; social loafing

CONTEXT:

• Adequate Resources: teams must receive the necessary support from mgt and the larger org if they are going to succeed.  A scarcity in resources directly reduces the ability of the team to perform its job effectively.
• Leadership & Structure: team members must agree on who is to do what and ensure that all members contribute equally in sharing the workload. 
• Climate of Trust: Interpersonal trust amongst team members facilitates cooperation, reduces the need to monitor each others's behaving, and bonds members around the belief that others on the team won't take advantage of them.  In addition, team members are more likely to take risks and expose vulnerabilities when they feel they can trust their team.
• Performance Evaluation and reward systems: traditional evaluation system must be modified to reflect team performance. (ex: group based appraisals, profit sharing, small group incentives)

COMPOSITION

• Ability of members: part of team's performance depends on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of its indiviudal members.
• Personality:  many of the dimensions of the Big Five personality model have been shown to be relevant to team effectiveness (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability).
• Allocating Roles: Teams have different needs and people should be selected to ensure all roles are filled.
• Diversity: It would be reasonable to conclude that heterogenous teams - those composed of dissimilar individuals - would be more likely to have diverse abilities and information and would be more effective.  Essentially, diversity promotes conflict, which stimulates creativity, which leads to improved decision making.
• Size:  most effective teams have 10 members or less.
• Flexibility:  teams made up of flexible individuals have members that can complete each other's tasks.
• Preference:  not every employee is a team player.  When selecting a team, individual preferences should be considered as well as abilities, personalities, and skills. 

Creating Effective Teams:     

WORK DESIGN

WORK DESIGN

• Autonomy and Freedom: (seperate/ independent)
• Skill Variety: opportunity to use different skills and talents
• Task Identity: ability to complete a whole and identifiable task or product.
• Task Significance: working on a task or project that has substantial impact on others.

These characteristcs enhance member motivation and increase team effectiveness.

Creating Effective Teams:

 PROCESS

PROCESS

• Common Purpose: purpose is a vision, it is more broad than specific goals
• Specific Goals: successful teams translate their common pupose into specific, measureable, and realistic performance goals.  Team goals should be challenging.
• Team Efficacy: effecivte teams have conficence and believe they can succeed.
• Conflict: conflict can improve team effectiveness as they stimulate discussion, promote critical assessment of problems and options, and can lead to better team decisions.
• Social Loafing: when individuals hide inside a group.

Production: leaving early, Intentionally working slowly, wasting resources

Property: Sabotage, lying about hours worked, stealing from the organization

Political: Showing Favoritism, Gossiping and spreading rumors, blaming coworkers

Personal Aggression: Sexual Harassment, verbal abuse, stealing from coworkers

Punctuated-Equilibrium Model

- Temporary groups under time constrained deadlines go through transitions between inertia and activity.

- At the half-way point, they experience an increase in productivity.

Sequence of actions:

ACTUAL GROUP EFFECTIVENESS = Potential Group Effectiveness + Process Gains - Process Losses

GOAL:

 Maximize Process Gains While Minimizing Process Losses!

ANYTHING that slows down the process of the team’s work is a “Process Loss.”  

    Which of these happens to you most often?

Three tests to see if a team fits the situation

Beware:  Teams are not always the answer!

True or False:

The evidence suggests that teams typically outperform individuals when the tasks being done require multiple skills, judgment, and experience.

True or False:

Work groups have no need or opportunity to engage in collective work that requires joint effort.

True or False:

Work groups generate positive synergy while a work team does not.

True or False:

Problem-solving teams are not only autonomous but they have the ability to solve problems, implement, solutions, and assume full responsibility for outcomes.

True or False:

Self-managed work teams have dramatically decreased the importance of supervisory positions, even to the point of eliminating those positions.

True or False:

Cross-functional teams represent employees from various hierarchical levels within organization.

True or False:

Virtual teams use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members in order to achieve a common goal.

True or False:

Research studies indicate that homogeneous teams perform more effectively than do those that are heterogeneous.

True or False:

Many dimensions identified in the Big Five personality model have been shown to be relevant to team effectiveness.

True or False:

For the most part, individuals raised in an individualistic society readily accept the concept of team membership.

• Outperform individuals on tasks requiring multiple skills, judgement, and experience.
• Better utilization of employee talents
• More flexible and responsive to changing events
• Effective way for management to democratize the organization and increase employee motivation

• Typically 10-15 employees
• Team takes on supervisory responsibilities in addition to job tasks
• Select and evaluate team members
• Effectiveness is situationally dependent

• Members from diverse areas within and between organizations
• Exchange Information
• Develop new ideas and solve problems
• Coordinate complex projects
• Development may be time-consuming due to complexity and diversity

•Computer technology ties physically dispersed members together to achieve a common goal

•Differentialting factors from other teams

 §Absence of para-verbal and non-verbal cues

   §Limited social context

    §Ability to overcome time and space constraints

• Context
• Composition
• Work Design
• Process

• Presence of adequate resources
• Effective Leadership
• Climate of Trust
• Performance evaluation and reward system that reflects team contributions

• Ability of members
• personality
• allocating roles
• diversity
• size of teams
• member flexibility
• member preferences

• Freedom and Autonomy
• Skill Variety
• Task Identity
• Task Significance

• Member commitment to a common purpose
• Establishment of specific team goals
• Team Efficacy
• Managed level of conflict
• minimizing social loafing

• Rewards – rework to encourage cooperative efforts rather than competitive ones

Factors impacting the internal structure of the group, which affect member behavior.

ØRoles

Definition:  A set of expected behavior patterns attributed to someone occupying a given position in a social unit.

INCLUDES:

- Role Identity:  attitudes/ behaviors   consistent with a role. 

- Role Perception:  how one perceives they are supposed to act in a situation. 

- Role Expectations:  how others think a person should act in a situation.

- Role Conflict:  divergent role expectations.

Norms:

Acceptable standards of behavior within a group that are shared by the group’s members.

Classes of Norms:

Though critics later questioned procedures and analyses of data, the Hawthorne Studies remain a landmark work in scope as well as inspiring interest in studying human behavior in organizations.

Coincidentally, the “Hawthorne Effect” in industrial engineering/management and the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle” in physics were posited at the same time in two entirely different fields:

- Hawthorne Effect:  Observing humans      changes their behavior.

- Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:  That which is measured -- changes.

The #1 Complaint for Teams

Other Conclusions:

 Definition:  Degree to which group members are attracted to each other and are motivated to stay in the group.

Increasing group cohesiveness:

Groupthink:  Phenomenon in which the norm for consensus overrides the realistic (or critical) appraisal of alternative courses of action. 

ANTIDOTES = Group Size < 10, Impartial Leader, “Devil’s Advocate”   

Groupshift:  A change in decision risk between the group’s final decision and the individual decision that member within the group would make; can be either toward conservatism or greater risk. 

- Occurs because of a diffusion of individual responsibility.

Interacting Groups  (face-to-face)

- Brainstorming  (idea generation technique that

      follows four specific rules)

- Nominal Group Technique or NGT  (idea  

      prioritization technique)

- Electronic Meetings

- The Delphi Technique  (Established at the

                                                  Rand Corporation)

1) People with technical expertise

2) People with the problem-solving and decision-making skills who can identify problems, generate alternatives, evaluate those alternatives, and make competent choices

3) People with good listening, feedback, conflict resolution, and other interpersonal skills.

degree to which members of a group share a common demographic attribute such as age, sex, race, educational level, or length of service in the organization, and the impact of this attribute on turnover.

Few trends have influenced employee jobs as much as the massive movement to introduce teams into the workplace.  The shift from working alone to working on teams requires employees to cooperate with others, share information, confront differences, and minimize personal interests for the greater good of the team.  Effective teams have common characteristics:

1) Adequate Resources

2) Effective Leadership

3) A Climate of Trust

4) A performance evaluation and reward system that reflects team contributions.

Effective Teams have individuals with technical expertise, as well as problem-solving, decision-making, and interpersonal skills; team members also have high scores on the personality characteristics of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.  Effective teams also tend to be small - with fewer than 10 people - preferably made up of individuals with diverse backgrounds.  They ahve members who fill role demands, are flexible, and prefer to be part of a group.  The work that members do provides freedeom and autonomy, the opportunity to use different skills and talents, the ability to complete a whole and identifiable task or product, and work that has a subtantial impact on others.  Also, effective teams have members committed to a common purpose, specifice team goals, members who believe in the team's capabilities, a manageable level of conflict, and a minimal degree of social loafing.

Because indivudalistic organizations and societies attract and reward individual accomplishments, it is more difficult to create team players in these environmnets.  To make the conversion, management should selct individuals with the interpersonal skills to be effective team players, provide training to develop teamwork skills, and reward individuals for cooperative efforts.

What can management do to increase Team Efficacy?

(Efficacy = power or capacity to produce a desired effect; effectiveness)

1) Help the team achieve small successes.  Small successes build team confidence.  As a team develops a stronger peformance record, it also increases the collective belief that future efforts will lead to success.

2) Providing skill training.  Managers should consider providing training to improve memebers technical and interpersonal skills.  The greater the abilities of team members, the greater the likelihood that the team will develop confidence and the capability to deliver on that confidence.

1) national culture is highly individualistic

2) teams are being introduced into an established organization that has historically valued individual achievement.

1) Selection:  when hiring team members, managers should ensure that in addition to technical skills required to fill the job, candiats can also fulfill both their team roles and technical reqmts.

2) Training:  large proportion of people raised on the importance of individual accomplishments can be trained to become team players.

3) Rewards: the reward system must be reworked to encourage cooperative efforts rather than competitive ones. 

1) Have candidates undergo training to make them into team players

2) Transfer the individual to another unit within the org, without teams

3) Don't hire the candidate