TeamResearch News

June 2004
Vol. 1, No. 12

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From the Editor: We made it, you and I: TeamResearch News turns one year old with this issue. Sometimes I've wondered why I was doing all this work for no pay, especially when I sit inside a coffee shop writing this on a pretty Sunday afternoon. The reason I write this, though, is no secret—it's posted on my web site, as the mission for TeamTrainers Consulting: "To improve people's lives by spreading the benefits of true teaming as widely as possible." I have seen first-hand how people in empowered teams and their managers become happier at work, because they feel a new sense of accomplishment, less frustration and negative conflict, and less stress. This is a cliché, but it also is true: If just one of you has learned and applied something from my year's work that made your and your stakeholders' lives better, this newsletter has been a success. And if not—or if it really is only one—I'll just have to try harder in the next year! Thank you for subscribing.

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Contents

Studies and Articles

• Team Cohesion Leads to Simulated Airline Success
  Desire to be on the team influenced success in airline market simulations.
• No Leadership Style Fits All Problems
  Inviting a short-lived team to participate in an easier decision hurt its performance and satisfaction.
• Virtual Teams Succeed Through Communication, Good Technology Use
  Along with other useful tools and practices, a good web site is common among successful virtual teams.
• Political Skills Help Teams Find Homes for Kids
  Leaders who feel they can persuade and influence help teams to help foster kids.

Newsletter Information

• About This Newsletter
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Team Cohesion Leads to Simulated Airline Success

Study: Team cohesion—defined as "the degree to which members are attracted to their team and desire to remain in it"—helps teams perform. But little research has looked at how cohesion affects top management teams, and none had been done in an academic experiment where other factors that might have affected the results could be ruled out.

Three scientists created 81 teams of college-senior management students diverse in specialty, gender, and nationality, and gave each an airline to run. That is, they used a respected, very complex computer simulation game "based on extensive research of the commuter airline industry" and considered a realistic model of the airline market. The teams were divided into groups of four to 12. The different groups received different economic scenarios, and competed over a 12-week period with each week representing a quarter-year. To provide motivation, ten percent of each student's capstone-project class grade was tied to his or her team's performance.

On a week-by-week basis, the researchers compared the computer-reported financial performance of each team with its members' reported levels of cohesion. They controlled the data to mask the effects of debt levels, which can affect performance; firm size; number of competitors; team size; and the previous week's performance (so they'd know that performance wasn't causing cohesion, instead of the other way around).

Team cohesion had little effect on performance at first (weeks 1-5), began to have an effect at Week 6, and after that made a powerful difference in the ability of a firm to outperform the competitors within its group.

Application: The researchers believe team cohesion fits the definition of a "strategic asset" for competitive advantage. A strategic asset cannot be bought, since competitors presumably have equal access to assets that can be bought. Instead, such an asset is "rare and difficult and costly to imitate…" Among the reasons team cohesion fits the mold are that:

• Cohesion develops over time and is affected by many events, thus making it hard to imitate;
• It is a social phenomenon subject to the personalities of the team;
• It's invisible, "making it hard for competitors to imitate";
• It can be hard to identify as the cause of success given the other possible causes, so even if a competitor knows you have it, they may not realize its importance to your success;
• Perfectly replicating a team's cohesion would require hiring the whole team, and even if everybody bolted together, "the team's cohesion could be affected by the new corporate climate."

• Creating goals for the team separate from the corporate goals—goals explaining what the managers will do to help the company achieve the goals they have set for it.
• Determining from the managers what they dislike about working as a team and addressing those problems through rule-making, role definition, and skills training.

No Leadership Style Fits All Problems

Study: A recently published university study of virtual teams at first seems hard to apply to the real world, but actually parallels some real-world teams. Teams of undergraduates were asked to provide solutions to a campus problem communicating only through a computer tool intended to help with group decision-making. Though they had met the other team members, the tool kept their comments anonymous. Each team had a "plant"—someone working with the researchers—who was labeled the "leader" and played the role of either an order-giving manager ("directive" style) or one who encouraged collaboration in decisions ("participative" style). Teams tackled either a narrow issue of how to evaluate professors, or a broader one of how to improve the university's prestige.

Participation in the decision-making improved group performance, but not members' satisfaction with the team experience. This was especially true for the easier problem. Participation probably enabled "a more thorough consideration of each problem's potential set of solutions." But because the computer tool was not good at helping people focus on the best ideas, it likely made greater participation a frustrating experience due to the larger number of ideas the team had to sift through. Meanwhile, perceived leadership style had different effects on the different problems: directive style (predictably) hurt performance on the more complex problem, but participatory style hurt on the easier problem. The writers suggest that since members probably feel they can handle an easy problem, the added complexity of participatory decision-making seems redundant.

Application: Again, this study may seem too contrived to be of much use in the real world. But the authors point out, "The temporary nature of the groups in this study and the short duration of the group's task correspond to conditions often observed in focus group meetings and task forces…" It also fits with one common complaint among teams in the midst of growing toward self-management: that managers take up the teams' time with small, unimportant decisions while the team is trying to focus on bigger things. In short, participative leadership is not always the best style, even when you want the team to be empowered some day. Ken Blanchard ("The One-Minute Manager") notes that early in a team's development, it will continue to need directive leadership. Only as it becomes ready for more responsibility should greater participation be encouraged, and not until the team's bigger problems are worked out will it be ready to take full control over its operations.

Virtual Teams Succeed Through Communication, Good Technology Use

Article: One problem with success stories in business magazines is their tendency to focus only on the positives. When four Harvard researchers tried to look at what helps virtual teams work, they tried to overcome this by asking executives' permission to talk with both successful and failed teams. "They balked," the scientists write. "No one wanted to talk about failures." So they were forced to look only at successful teams, but ended up with 54 teams in 26 countries and a variety of industries. The result is a list of common attributes of successful teams, summarized under "Application" below.

Team members completed 25-minute surveys, each team leader was interviewed, and upper managers rated their team's success using nine factors. Among the successes these teams achieved were:

• Designing of a new rocket engine that, compared to similar projects in the same company, cost millions of dollars less to produce, used a team one-tenth the typical size, and was created in one-tenth the typical time span using 1% of the usual labor hours.
• Delivery of "virtual training to 80% of its company's employees at one-eighth the traditional cost."
• Merger of "the IT infrastructures of two billion-dollar firms without suffering a single mishap on day one."

One finding will be a bit surprising to regular readers of this newsletter: "Fewer than 4% of the 293 participants…reported ever meeting with all of their fellow team members face-to-face…" Since most research points to the importance of in-person meetings, I think the difference is that these teams may have all been short-term teams (the article isn't clear). The engine team existed only 10 months. Most of the research I've seen to date focused on "permanent" teams for which a higher level of interaction is required over time, where face-to-face meetings may be more vital. On the other hand, since there is a lag of two to three years (or more) between when research is conducted and when it is published, perhaps we are beginning to see newer collaboration technology catch up to the published literature (see Rule 2 below).

Application: The researchers summarized the following rules and techniques that seemed common to these teams. Please bear in mind, however, they they were not able to compare these teams to failures, so there's no way to be sure that these are the techniques that create the successes.

"Rule 1: Exploit Diversity"

• Choose people "on the strength of their differences" in background and training.
• Encourage a lot of conversation.
• Make team missions somewhat flexible so members can pursue promising new directions.
• Have everyone teleconference from their desks, even people in the same office, to ensure people communicate the same way.
• If "wallflowers" won't participate, draw them out in meetings, mentor them in between, and if they don't respond, replace them.
• Start each teleconference with a topic you know will "generate some heat."
• If you use a personality assessment, have people remind other members of their tendencies when they speak: "'As you know, I think out loud,' said one with a high extroversion score.'"

"Rule 2: Use Technology to Simulate Reality"

• "Many in our study found e-mail a poor way for teams as a whole to collaborate."
• Instant messaging was highly useful for some teams, but others found it bothersome.
• Videoconferencing was only used by a third of the teams; most respondents felt the current technology inadequate to the task of collaboration, and even to detract from it.
• Regular conference calls were used by most teams, but primarily to work out issues, not just report on work status.
• The big winner was virtual workspaces that went well beyond the typical shared folder of documents, featuring, for example:
• Threaded discussions that were facilitated and summarized.
• Prominent display and tracking of the team's mission, goals, and tasks.
• Team member profiles including not only contact information but pictures, "accomplishments, areas of expertise, and interests…"
• Information on stakeholders.
• Meeting agendas, background information, and minutes.

"Rule 3: Hold the Team Together"

• "Team leaders rarely let a day go by when members did not communicate with one another."
• "One team leader reported being on the phone with his team for ten to 15 hours a week."
• Adopt a common language and post a glossary of team terminology, not only technical jargon but also "figures of speech such as 'home run' and 'go for broke.'"
• Have members work in various groupings as subteams, to build cohesion and reduce clique-formation.
• Specify with members' supervisors how much time the member can spend on the team's efforts.
• Negotiate team-based financial incentives for members with their supervisors.

Political Skills Help Teams Find Homes for Kids

Study: A group of researchers note in a new study report, "work environments are inherently political. As such, to be effective, one must develop the ability to persuade, influence, and control others, which has often been referred to as 'political skill.'" The scientists wanted to know how a team leader's political skill affected the team's success, and they picked a vital measure of group performance: the ability of case worker teams to place foster children in permanent living arrangements ("adoption…guardianship, or return to natural parents").

One-hundred team leaders in a state social agency and 438 of their team members were surveyed. The results took into account differences in member and leader experience, caseloads, and level of team empowerment (as perceived by the team members). As you might predict, the leader's political skills had a major impact on placements, even larger than team empowerment.

Application: Political skills was self-rated by leaders, so it is more accurate to say "leader's perceptions" of their political skills were important. The scientists admit it would have been helpful to have team members rate the skill of the leaders as well. But selecting and/or training team leaders to have better political skills should also improve their self-perceptions, so for you the difference may be moot. To help you improve those skills, the statements used to measure political skill are listed below (all are direct quotations). The higher the leader rated him- or herself on each, the higher the political skill was considered to be:

• I find it easy to envision myself in the position of others.
• I am able to make most people feel comfortable and at ease around me.
• It is easy for me to develop good rapport with most people.
• I understand people well.
• I am good at getting others to respond positively to me.
• I usually try to find common ground with others.

About This Newsletter

TeamResearch News summarizes the latest information from studies or articles on business teams, along with guidance on how to apply that research in your workplace. It is published the first full weekend of each month as a free service from TeamTrainers^TM Consulting (www.suddenteams.com). Plain-text e-mail announcements are mailed to subscribers whenever a new issue is posted, containing a list of that month's studies and articles and a link to the newsletter. See our newsletter page for details about the newsletter, cautions about studies, and our privacy policy.

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Contact the Editor

Your questions and suggestions are always welcome. Contact:

Jim Morgan
Head Coach, TeamTrainers Consulting
(425) 823-5082
jim@suddenteams.com
www.suddenteams.com