ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR, UNDERSTANDING WORK TEAMS, ROBBINS

1. UNDERSTANDING
WORK TEAMS
Dr.Rajesh Kamath
Assistant Professor,
Department of Public Health,
Manipal university

2. Understanding Work Teams
• Teams today are very popular. Why?
• Teams are more flexible and responsive to
changing events than traditional departments.
• They are an effective means for management
to democratize organisations….
• …thereby increasing employee motivation.

3. Understanding Work Teams –
Differences between Groups and Teams.
• Are Groups and Teams the same thing?
• No…Why?
WORK GROUPS WORK TEAMS
A group that interacts primarily to
share information and to make
decisions to help each group member
perform within his or her area of
responsibility.
A group whose individual efforts
result in performance that is greater
than the sum of the individual inputs.
Their performance is merely the
summation of each group member’s
individual contribution. There is no
Synergy.
A work team generates positive
Synergy through coordinated effort.

4. Understanding Work Teams

5. Understanding Work Teams
• The use of teams creates the potential for an
organisation to generate greater outputs with
no increase in inputs.
• Merely calling a group a team will not help.
Effective teams have certain common
characteristics, as we shall see…

6. Understanding Work Teams –
Types of teams
• Types of teams :
• 1. Problem solving teams.
• 2. Self managed work teams.
• 3. Cross functional teams.
• 4. Virtual teams.

7. Understanding Work Teams –
Problem solving teams
• 1. Problem solving teams : Groups of 5 to 12
employees from the same department who meet for a
few hours each week to discuss ways of improving
quality, efficiency, and the work environment.
• Members share ideas on work processes and methods.
But rarely have the authority to implement any
suggestions.
• Merrill Lynch created a problem solving team to reduce
the number of days it took to open a new cash
management account. Number of steps reduced from
46 to 36. Number of days from 15 to 8.

8. Understanding Work Teams –
Self managed work teams
• 2. Self managed work teams : Groups of 10 to 15 people
who take on responsibilities of their former supervisors like
planning and scheduling work, assigning tasks to members,
operating decisions, working with suppliers and customers.
• They might even select and evaluate their own members.
• Not only solve problems, but implement solutions and take
responsibility for outcomes.
• Research not uniformly positive. Why?
• Do not manage conflicts well.
• When disputes arise, members stop cooperating, group
performance decreases.

9. Understanding Work Teams –
Cross functional teams.
• 3. Cross functional teams : Employees from about the same
hierarchical level, but from different work areas, who come
together to accomplish a task.
• Boeing formed a team from production, planning, quality
control, tooling, design engineering and information
systems for its C 17 program. The team’s suggestions
drastically reduced cycle time and costs as well as improved
quality.
• All the major automobile manufacturers – Toyota, Honda,
Renault, Suzuki, Tata, Ford currently use this form of team.
• The early stages of development are long, as members
learn to deal with diversity and complexity. It takes time to
build trust and teamwork.

10. Understanding Work Teams
• 4. Virtual teams : Teams that use computer technology
to tie together physically dispersed members in order
to achieve a common goal.
• Wide area networks, video conferencing, email.
• Less social support, less direct interaction among
members, less satisfaction.
• For effectiveness, managers should ensure:
• 1. Trust is established among members.
• 2. Team progress is monitored closely.
• 3. The efforts of the team are publicised throughout
the organisation.

11. Understanding Work Teams
• Creating Effective teams :
• The team effectiveness model :
• The model attempts to generalise across all
varieties of teams, hence cannot be rigidly
applied to all teams.
• The model assumes teamwork is preferable to
individual work.

12. CONTEXT :
1. ADEQUATE RESOURCES
2. LEADERSHIP AND STRUCTURE
3. CLIMATE OF TRUST
4. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND REWARD
SYSTEMS
COMPOSITION :
1. ABILITIES OF MEMBERS
2. PERSONALITY
3. ALLOCATING ROLES
4. DIVERSITY
5. SIZE OF TEAMS
6. MEMBER FLEXIBILITY
7. MEMBER PREFERENCES
PROCESS
1. COMMON PURPOSE
2. SPECIFIC GOALS
3. TEAM EFFICACY
4. CONFLICT LEVELS
5. SOCIAL LOAFING
TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

13. Understanding Work Teams
• 1. CONTEXT :
• 1.1 Adequate resources :
• Timely information
• Proper equipment
• Adequate staffing
• Encouragement
• Administrative assistance

14. Understanding Work Teams
• 1.2. Leadership and Structure :
• Agreeing on the specifics of work and how
they fit together to integrate individual skills
requires leadership and structure, either from
management or from the team members
themselves.
• Especially important in multi-team systems.

15. Understanding Work Teams
• 1.3 Climate of trust :
• In each other.
• In their leader.
• Reduces the need to monitor each others’
behaviour.
• More likely to take risks and expose
weaknesses.
• Trust is the foundation of leadership.

16. Understanding Work Teams
• 1.4 Performance evaluation and reward systems :
• In addition to rewarding the individual,
management should have team based evaluation
and rewards like
• 1. Group based appraisals.
• 2. Profit sharing.
• 3. Gainsharing.
• 4. Small-group incentives.

17. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Abilities of members
• 2. TEAM COMPOSITION :
• 2.1 Abilities of members :
• These abilities set limits on what members can do and how
effectively they will perform on a team.
• 3 skills required in a team :
• 1. Technical expertise.
• 2. Problem solving and decision making skills to identify
problems, generate and evaluate alternatives and make
competent choices.
• 3. Interpersonal skills.
• The team members can learn these skills if they do not
possess them.

18. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Abilities of members
• Research reveals:
• When the task entails considerable thought (solving a complex problem
such as reengineering an assembly line), high ability teams (composed of
mostly intelligent members) do better than low ability teams.
• High ability teams are more adaptable to changing situations.
• Surprisingly, when tasks are simple, high ability teams do not perform as
well, perhaps because members become bored and turn their attention
to other activities that are more stimulating, whereas low ability teams
stay on task.
• Smart team leaders help less intelligent team members when they
struggle with a task.
• But a less intelligent leader can neutralise the effect of a high ability
team.

19. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Personality of members
• 2.2 Personality of members :
• 3 dimensions relevant to team effectiveness :
• 1. Conscientiousness – Good at backing up other
team members, and also good at sensing when
that support is truly needed.
• 2. Openness to experience – Communicate
better, more creative, innovative.
• 3. Team member agreeableness – Teams do
worse when they have one or more highly
disageeable members.

20. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Personality of members
• Suppose an organisation needs to create 20
teams of 4 people each and has 40 highly
conscientious people and 40 who score low on
conscientiousness, would the organisation be
better off…
• (a) Forming 10 teams of highly conscientious
people and 10 teams of members low on
conscientiousness, OR
• (b) “Seeding” each team with 2 people who
scored high and 2 who scored low on
conscientiousness.

21. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Personality of members
• Option (a), WHY?
• Contribution inequity.
• Highly conscientious people might need to
perform their own tasks as well as that of
those low on conscientiousness.

22. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Allocation of roles
• 2.3 Allocation of roles :
• As managers, we should know that research
suggests that we ought to put our most Able,
Experienced, and Conscientious workers in the
most central roles in a team.

23. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Allocation of roles

24. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Diversity of Members
• 2.4 Diversity of Members :
• How does team diversity affect team performance?
• Team members are generally focussed on their
similarities, i.e. commonly held information or skills. Is
that ideal?
• But to realise their creative potential, diverse teams
need to focus on their differences.
• The key is for members of diverse teams to
communicate what they uniquely know and also what
they do not know.
• Inspirational common goal provided – teams are very
creative.

25. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Diversity of Members
• Organisational demography : The degree to which
members of a work unit share a common demographic
attribute such as age, sex, race, educational level or length
of service in an organisation, and the impact of this
attribute on the turnover.
• Turnover will be greater among those with dissimilar
experiences because communication is more difficult.
• Conflict and power struggles are more likely and are more
severe when they occur.
• Increased conflict makes membership less attractive, so
employees are more likely to quit.
• The losers in a power struggle are more likely to leave
voluntarily or be forced out.

26. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Diversity of Members
• 2.5 Size of teams :
• Most effective teams – 5 to 9 members.
• Experts suggest using the smallest number of people who
can do the task.
• Unnecessarily large teams…
• 1….will have Coordination issues, especially under time
pressure.
• 2. Social loafing.
• 3. More people communicate less.
• If a natural working unit is larger and you want a team
effort, what do you do?
• Consider breaking the group into subteams.

27. Understanding Work Teams – Team
composition – Diversity of Members
• 2.6 Member preferences :
• Not everybody is a team player.
• When non team players are put in a team,
there is a direct threat to the team morale and
to individual member satisfaction.
• As managers…
• …consider individual preferences along with
abilities, personalities, and skills.

28. Understanding Work Teams – Team
Processes –Common plan and purpose
• 3. TEAM PROCESSES
• 3.1 Common plan and Purpose :
• Teams that establish a clear sense of what needs
to be done and how consistently perform better.
• Perfectly executing the wrong plan is a lost cause.
• Effective teams show reflexivity – meaning they
reflect on and adjust their master plan when
necessary.

29. Understanding Work Teams – Team
Processes – Specific goals
• 3.2 Specific Goals :
• Successful teams translate their common purpose
into specific, measurable and realistic
performance goals.
• Specific goals facilitate clear communication.
• They help teams maintain their focus on getting
results.
• Difficult goals raise team performance; eg. Goals
for quantity tend to raise quantity, goals for
accuracy raise accuracy.

30. Understanding Work Teams – Team
Processes – Team efficacy
• 3.3 Team Efficacy : is the belief in success that a
team has.
• Teams that have tasted success have more belief
in their future success, which in turn motivates
them to work harder.
• What can management do to increase team
efficacy?
• 1. Help the team achieve small successes that
build confidence.
• 2. Provide training to improve members’
technical and interpersonal skills.

31. Understanding Work Teams–Team
Processes–Team efficacy–Mental models
• Mental Models : Team members’ knowledge
and beliefs about how the work gets done by
the team.
• If team members have different ideas about
how to do things, the team will fight over how
to do things rather than focus on what need
to be done.

32. Understanding Work Teams – Team
Processes – Conflict levels
• 3.4 Conflict Levels :
• What is your opinion on conflict?
• Conflict in a team is not necessarily bad.
• What happens when teams are completely devoid of conflict?
• They are likely to become apathetic and stagnant.
• But Relationship conflicts – those based on interpersonal
incompatibilities, tension, and animosity- are dysfunctional.
• However, Task conflicts – disagreements over task content – stimulate
discussion, promote critical assessment of problems and options, and
can lead to better team decisions.
• Effective teams resolved conflicts by explicitly discussing the issues.
• Ineffective teams had conflicts focussed more on
personalities and the way things were said.

33. Understanding Work Teams
• 3.5 Social Loafing :
• Effective teams take care of this by making
members individually and jointly accountable.
• Members should be clear on what they are
individually responsible for and what they are
jointly responsible for on the team.

34. Understanding Work Teams – Turning
individuals into team players
• As managers, what are your options to turn
individuals into team players?
• 1. Selecting : Hiring team players.
• 2. Training : Creating team players.
• 3. Rewarding : Providing incentives to be a
good team player.

35. Understanding Work Teams–Turning individuals
into team players-Selecting:Hiring team players
• 1. Selecting : Hiring team players.
• Some people already possess the interpersonal skills to be
effective team players.
• As managers, what should you look at when hiring people?
• Make sure candidates can fulfill their team roles as well as
technical requirements.
• When faced with candidates who lack team skills, what are
your options?
• 1. Training to become team players.
• 2. Transfer them to another unit that does not have teams.
• 3. Don’t hire them.

36. Understanding Work Teams–Turning individuals into
team players-Training : Creating team players
• 2. Training : Creating team players.
• Training specialists conduct exercises that
allow employees to experience the
satisfaction teamwork can provide.
• Workshops – problem solving,
communication, negotiation, conflict-
management.
• Team building exercises – Paintball – Capture
the flag.

37. Understanding Work Teams–Turning
individuals into team players-Rewarding
• 3. Rewarding : Providing incentives to be a good team player.
• Encourage cooperative efforts rather than competitive ones.
• Eg. : Hallmark cards added to its basic individual-incentive
system an annual bonus based on achievement of team goals.
How does this influence team members?
• As a result, teams select new members carefully so they will
contribute to team effectiveness (and thus team bonuses)
• It is usually best to set a cooperative tone as soon as possible
in the life of a team.
• Teams that rush from a competitive to a cooperative system
do not share information and make rushed, poor-quality
decisions.

38. Understanding Work Teams–
HOMEWORK
• 1. Beware! Teams are not always the answer.
• 2. Global implications.
• 3. Summary and implications for managers.

39. • References :
• ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR - STEPHEN
ROBBINS – 14TH EDITION

40. THANK YOU