Teamwork Between Teams Improves Project Performance

Team research often focuses on issues within a given team, but this ambitious study looked also at how issues between teams can affect the success of a project. Three European researchers followed a $500-million product innovation project within a car manufacturer by interviewing members and managers of 39 cross-functional teams one, two and three years into the project. The goal was to see how internal and external team dynamics affected team performance, as measured by teams meeting the standard project goals of quality (or "scope"), schedule and budget. The results were:

• Coordination between teams strongly improved schedule performance, but didn't help quality and hurt budgets slightly. The researchers suggested this may be because coordinating on scope requires compromises with other teams, and coordination has time costs that could add to budgets (editorial note: if not accounted for in advance).
• High levels of coordination were more important early in the project than later for those teams that had to cooperate with a high number of other teams to complete their parts of the project. Overall, though, coordination was no more important early than later in the project.
• Commitment to project goals—as opposed to team goals—improved team performance, though this, too, was more true for teams needing a lot of outside cooperation.
• Better teamwork within teams improved performance, primarily through better meeting of schedule objectives. This was especially true for teams that had better teamwork early in the project.
• Better within-team teamwork strongly helped both project commitment and cooperation with other teams.

How did these results translate to practical effects? The researchers ranked all 39 teams on combined scores for between-team coordination, project commitment, and teamwork quality. "The top 5 teams are 1.8 weeks behind schedule at (year) 3, while the bottom 5 teams are 10.4 weeks behind…"

Source: Hoegl, M., K. Weinkauf, and H. Gemuenden (04), "Interteam Coordination, Project Commitment, and Teamwork in Multiteam R&D Projects: A Longitudinal Study," Organization Science 15(1):38.