TeamResearch News

January 2004
Vol. 1, No. 7

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From the Editor: An article in Business Week (11/24/03) on the resurgence of Cisco Systems attributed part of the turnaround to Cisco imposing "operating discipline on entrepreneurial staffers who had been too busy taking orders and cashing stock options to bother with efficiency, cost-cutting, or teamwork…" In another change, "Execs encouraged to compete with one another found that teamwork would count for as much as 30% of their annual bonuses." Cisco learned that standard practices for high-tech firms were not necessarily best practices. Several items in this issue include other examples.

Contents

Studies and Articles

• Team Expectations Help New Members Succeed
• Job Challenges and Freedom Equal Performance
• Rewarding Cooperation May Not Help Task Speed
• Problem-Solving Replaces Training, Works Better

Standard Practices Are Not Always Best Practices

Newsletter Information

• About This Newsletter
• Subscribe/Unsubscribe
• Contact the Editor

Team Expectations Help New Members Succeed

Study: Research has generally supported the idea of the "self-fulfilling prophecy" when it comes to starting a new job, in two ways:

• Newcomers who think they will perform well do things that help them to indeed perform well, and
• If a boss expects a newcomer to do well, he or she does things that help the newcomer succeed.

But does this hold true in a team environment? Two scientists surveyed 70 information technology project teams across the U.S. in three companies. In general the self-fulfilling prophecy worked, in this way:

1. A newcomer's prior experience influenced the expectations that team leaders and colleagues had for the new person.
2. Higher expectations led managers to give more complex work to the newcomer and raised the quality of his or her interactions with team members.
3. Complex work and good interactions increased the newcomer's sense of empowerment.
4. Also, the newcomer's self-expectations increased his or her sense of empowerment both directly and by improving interactions with team members.
5. Both higher sense of empowerment and higher team expectations improved the newcomer's performance.

Application: My SuddenTeams® Program includes instructions for helping a team create operating procedures and teaches managers how to involve members in decisions affecting the team. Procedures that allow team members a voice in who joins them will increase their expectations of those people. Agreed-upon steps for training newcomers on team values and operation, plus methods for them to suggest changes, will further improve their sense of empowerment. Together, the research suggests, these steps will increase the likelihood of the newcomers doing well.

The study authors warn that simply telling managers and team members to raise their expectations of newcomers is not as effective as having these kinds of systemic practices. These practices create a psychological setting in which expectations rise naturally and will be more lasting.

Source: Chen, G., and R. Klimoski (03), "The Impact of Expectations on Newcomer Performance in Teams as Mediated by Work Characteristics, Social Exchanges, and Empowerment," Academy of Management Journal 46(5):591.

Job Challenges and Freedom Equal Performance

Study: When teams aren't doing well, managers often ask people to work together better—or order or beg them to. But they make no changes in how they manage, then blame the group for not changing. Questionnaires completed by 2,200 individuals on 381 teams in a large multinational bank may point a way to improving team togetherness and performance without asking for it. This study looked at the relationship between:

• Job complexity, the "task or skill variety" involved in a team's daily work.
• Job autonomy, the "independence and freedom in how (a) team does the work."
• Group cohesiveness, how unified the team feels in trying to reach team goals.
• Group performance, as rated by each team's supervisor.
• Collectivism, the person's cultural orientation toward group versus individual work (the studied teams were in Hong Kong and the United States).

These variables were compared in various ways to learn how they were related. Job complexity and autonomy levels were highly related to group cohesiveness, which in turn was highly related to performance.

This was true in all teams, but much stronger in teams oriented toward individual work (mostly U.S. teams). The researchers suggest that this is because in collectivist cultures, group cohesiveness is already relatively high, so there's less room for variation based on work differences.

Application: The authors say that while motivating team members to put the group first can be difficult, their research points the way: "Members may not completely buy in to the 'in-group' concept…In order to promote group effectiveness and performance, management can assign them more challenging work and allow more latitude to groups in managing their own tasks." The more complex the work, the more members are forced to cooperate to accomplish that work. But upping the complexity without giving members the freedom to solve the new problems in its own way eliminates the point to group work, which is to tap into the collected wisdom of the group. As shown in the previous study, talking about desired changes won't have much effect. Managers who really want better performance should provide challenging work and the freedom to achieve it in the ways the team determines is best.

Rewarding Cooperation May Not Help Task Speed

Study: Although we know that in general members of teams need to be rewarded for working with each other to maximize group performance, few rules in human behavior apply in all cases. This study looked into the circumstances in which rewarding members for competing with each other—instead of cooperating—has benefits, using a simulated war game. In this case, 75 teams of four undergraduates had to protect bases against vehicles they could detect within a certain range but could not identify as friend or foe until the vehicles drew closer. Some teams were told the best team would get $40 to split ($10 each); others were told the best individual performer in each team would get $10. The researchers also tested for personality traits, and measured how fast enemy vehicles were destroyed (speed) and how many mistakes were made (accuracy).

The main findings were:

• Teams rewarded to cooperate were more accurate but not as fast as those rewarded to compete.
• Teams of people who were more shy and less agreeable did better when rewarded to compete, but personality was far less significant than type of task.
• The best individual performers weren't as affected by these factors as worst performers.

Application: I freely tell potential customers that empowered teaming is not the best group structure for every circumstance, and this study helps clarify where it is not. Where task speed is significantly more important than accuracy, or most members of a group prefer to "keep to themselves," the traditional raise and incentive systems that reward competition between employees may be better. Of course, speed and accuracy are only two components of any task, so be careful with this idea. But the personality information probably isn't very applicable to the working world, since most teams contain various personality types. If you have a group that does fairly simple, fast work with a smaller margin for error, instituting cooperative rewards may not pay off the effort. But if a group's work requires cooperation, I would still err on the side of rewarding cooperation.

Problem-Solving Replaces Training, Works Better

Article: A private hospital in New York City had paid for training in continuous quality improvement (CQI) twice: once from Ivy League college experts, and the other time from a "top-tier consulting firm." The author writes, "Although the participants had found the training experiences to be stimulating, informative, and enjoyable, the hospital could not identify any improvements in quality that stemmed from the training."

So the author, a management professor, suggested another approach. His team would meet weekly with the participants, teach them some basic problem-solving techniques, and help them use those techniques to solve actual problems at the hospital instead of hypothetical classroom problems. The hospital agreed and formed a cross-functional, multi-level team to tackle the major problem of patient records not being available when patients showed up for appointments. The team was given a time limit of 100 days and developed a measurable goal.

The approach to change was basic:

• develop a specific, measurable, realistic goal;
• provide fact-based feedback to those implementing change;
• hold those people accountable; and
• provide positive or negative consequences based on performance.

Repeating the process with a different team and problem had similar results: "Within 100 days, the emergency room cycle time was shortened by 48 percent, productivity increased by 93 percent, and the estimated return on investment was 1,270 percent."

Application: Reporting this case study is a bit self-serving, because it illustrates the TeamTrainers alternative to standard teambuilding. Specifically, it suggests the following tactics to improve training effectiveness:

• Measure the results of all training in terms of behavioral change in the workplace.
• Instead of general off-the-shelf training, invest in training that is specific to your company and needs.
• To accomplish change:
• Involve workers in designing the change,
• Set specific, measurable goals, and
• Provide consequences for making or not making those goals (taking into account factors outside of a worker's control).

Standard Practices Are Not Always Best Practices

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
Editor, TeamResearch News
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jim@suddenteams.com
www.suddenteams.com