TeamResearch News

February 2004
Vol. 1, No. 8

This newsletter is a basic HTML file, giving you control over the appearance through your Web browser's options and window controls.

From the Editor: Some of you received an e-mail announcing that I have refocused my career energies from consulting to seeking regular employment. As noted in that message, TeamResearch News will not be affected. I plan to continue TeamTrainers and its mission to "spread the benefits of true teaming as widely as possible" as an avocation. So if you know of any position in which my passion for helping groups achieve peak performance would be an asset, please let me know. Regardless, know that TeamResarch News will be here every month with results-oriented advice for your teams.

Contents

Studies and Articles

• Subgroups, Management Balance the Down Side of Diversity
• Themes Identified for Successful Work Cells
• Effect of Diversity on Teams is Complex
• Virtual and Standard Teams: More Similar than Different?
• BMW Empowers its Way to Mini Performance

Commit to Success Via Teamwork

Newsletter Information

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

Subgroups, Management Balance the Down Side of Diversity

Study: A team must learn in order to to get better at what it does, produce more work, and/or lower costs. To learn, a team must display learning behaviors such as experimenting with new ideas, communicating well, and writing down knowledge in a reusable form. We know that people who are similar are more willing to share ideas and tend to communicate better, but diversity contributes outside perspectives. So what is the best balance of similarity and diversity for team learning?

To find out, researchers conducted surveys of 724 individuals from around the world on 156 teams of various types in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Teams with good learning practices were very diverse as a whole, but in a way that moderately similar individuals could form natural subgroups. For example, consider both Team 1, a sales team of middle-aged Asian women on the job for a few years; and Team 2, each member of whom is very different from each other in job skills, age, experience, ethnicity, etc. Most teams have a level of diversity between these extreme examples, so two or more members share some—and only some— characteristics (personal and/or job-related.) For example, a CQI team from a major corporation could have: young gaming engineers, older male support staff, highly educated Japanese managers, etc. That team has the advantages of diversity, but each member feels safer expressing ideas because someone like the member is in the room. As the authors write, "Similarities within subgroups…enable information and insights to surface, while differences across subgroups ensure that a diversity of insights is considered." But if subgroup members are too similar, the advantages of the teams' diversity may disappear…the team may break down into nondiverse subteams.

A team also practiced more learning behaviors if it felt empowered, was held accountable for performance by its manager, and was supplied by its company with a knowledge management system. Nothing new there. But again, a team whose subgroups (if any) shared very few or very many characteristics were not helped as much by these supporting variables as those with subgroups that shared a moderate number of characteristics.

Application: "The implication," the authors write, "is that leaders may have to behave differently toward the teams they manage depending on their composition in terms of subgroup strength." In particular, "if a team has weak or strong subgroups, external leaders can stimulate learning by engaging in performance management." In the study, "performance management" meant the team's manager encouraged it to:

• "go over an activity before we attempt it"
• "set goals for our team performance," and
• "be aware of our level of performance"

A weakness in the study design is that the surveys did not test whether subgroups actually formed—that is, whether people behaved within subteams in the way the authors assume they would. But having reviewed the literature on similarity myself years ago, I think their assumption is a safe one that fits their data. And the final advice is nothing new, even if rarely taken to heart by many teams: make sure the team sets a goal, plans how to non diverse it, and monitors progress toward it.

Themes Identified for Successful Work Cells

Study: Part of many "lean manufacturing" operations are cross-functional combinations of people and equipment called "work cells" that create a deliverable from start to finish. For example, according to this study a Fortune 500 manufacturer of industrial equipment created cells to handle change orders; this reduced order processing time from two months to one day and reduced errors to near zero. The concept has been applied in service firms as well.

The authors say "real cells" have:

• Space Linkages: Human and technical resources are close together and "includes all the necessary skill sets and processing capabilities a product or service family will require."
• Time Linkages: Physical layout and work routines allow work to flow quickly between stations.
• Information Linkages: Layout and routines allow information about the work to flow easily; for example, the layout does not "prevent people from seeing or speaking to one another…"

The researchers followed 16 firms "reported to be using cell concepts effectively" for 10 years. By visiting sites, observing work, and interviewing workers, they discovered "five universal themes characterizing cells with long lives and absent where cells floundered or were disbanded."

Application: Here are the themes, in the authors' words:

To Create and Sustain Cells over Time:

• Involve Operators: They will have insights to offer and a vested interest in designing a well-functioning cell. Moreover, participation in design and implementation will prepare operators to improve and adapt the cell over time…
• Leverage the Cell's Power for Continued Process Improvement: Create a culture that makes the most of the cell's rich potential for ongoing improvement.
• Ensure that Design and Climate are Primed for Adaptation: …Cells that are positioned to adapt over time will have a greater life expectancy. Adaptability tactics include: movable equipment, cross-trained workers, a mind-set of quick response, and so forth.
• Design and Maintain a Supportive Infrastructure: Maintenance, engineering support, material planning and control, compensation, and information systems must fit and support the new cell architecture.
• Maintain an Appropriate Measurement System: Select a balanced set of customer-focused metrics and make them available to operators. You get what you measure.

Regarding the first theme, the authors present two examples of companies that reorganized to cells without involving the line workers in the decision-making. In both cases, the cells failed. Later each company tried again, this time with heavy line participation, and were successful.

An example of the CQI theme is a company that had a mandatory suggestion program; 40 hours of training (split between required and elective topics); rewards for improvements; and time and resources allowed for improvement efforts, such as weekly meeting times and occasional five-day "improvement events."

Source: Hyer, N., and K. Brown (03), "Work Cells with Staying Power: Lessons for Process-Complete Operations," California Management Review 46(1):27.

Effect of Diversity on Teams is Complex

Study: From 1997-2002, 63 studies of business teams were published on the tangible effects of diversity on team performance. Three researchers reviewed these studies to see what we've learned, and found some patterns you might find disappointing:

• The only type of diversity that clearly improved team performance (as measured through financial indicators or manager/member ratings) was "functional/occupational diversity."
• Racial or ethnic diversity was more often found to hurt performance then help it.
• Diversity did not appear to directly hurt group processes such as conflict or cooperation, however.
• The results regarding gender, age, national, and personality diversity were too mixed to draw any firm conclusions.
• The affect of diversity on team members' liking for each other is not yet clear, but doesn't seem as bad as some theorists expected (psychologists say people generally prefer those who are similar to themselves).
• There has been very little research into the effects:
• of status/level and skill diversity on team performance.
• of team diversity on team members' pay, individual performance, etc.
• that leaders can have on performance of diverse teams.
• that diversity has on other measures, such as knowledge flow.

Application: The first application is to question the assumptions many of us carry. It is one thing for us to wish on moral grounds that teams with mixed backgrounds performed better than others. But as yet, there is no proof that diversity based on personal characteristics provides a financial gain at the team level. Only functional diversity as seen in the work cells described earlier in this issue is proven to improve some teams' performance.

However, these studies suggest that unmanaged diversity may hurt teams, so training to help team members deal with their diversity remains vital. The authors suggested some other applications of their research for managers:

• Because of the power of peer pressure on attitudes toward people of other groups, "Training teams to manage and leverage their own diversity may prove more effective than training individuals."
• "…(M)anaging diversity effectively often requires pervasive changes in organizational policies, practices, and cultures."
• Key focal points of effective diversity training include:
• "Learning about the other group(s)" to eliminate inaccurate stereotypes.
• "Behavioral changes"—training on skills needed to interact with diverse others.
• "Creating positive emotions associated with the outgroup" through, for example, informal mentoring programs pairing individuals from different backgrounds.
• Gaining "new insight about their own ingroup," showing that one culture's approach is only one of many possibilities.
• Social sanctions: "Diversity programs were…more successful in organizations that required managers to attend training programs and tied compensation and other rewards for success in meeting goals for recruiting, hiring, developing, and promoting people from diverse backgrounds."

Virtual and Standard Teams: More Similar than Different?

Article: Studies indicate that "virtual" or "distributed" teams—those made up of people in different locations—have more conflicts than "collocated" teams of people in the same location. Hoping to jump start research into why this is, two researchers in Stanford's Center for Work, Technology and Organization analyzed what we know about virtual teams and team conflicts and came up with a number of theories. In virtual teams, the authors propose:

• Conflicts over tasks ("what to do") are higher because these teams tend to have higher diversity and differences in perspective and norms.
• Personal conflicts go up for the same reasons, plus the difficulty of establishing a good working rhythm when separated by time and distance.
• Process conflicts ("how to do it") go up because of the lack of rhythm and unfamiliarity with each other.
• Task conflicts are more likely to cause personal conflicts in virtual than standard teams because trust is harder to build when you don't interact often with someone frequently.
• Having to coordinate via technology instead of personal contact increases all three types of conflict because some information (such as emotions) aren't conveyed as well, and because important information is less likely to get distributed to everyone who needs it when needed.
• Although the right kind of task conflict can improve team performance (as discussed before in TeamResearch News) in standard teams, it always hurts virtual teams because of the additional difficulties of resolving conflict electronically.

Application: Fortunately, teams can overcome many of the downsides to their virtual status. Virtual teams, the article says, reduce the effect of distance and technology limitations by:

• Meeting face-to-face, preferably early in the team's life span and again at critical junctures such as work hand-offs.
• Conveying more personal, emotional, and contextual information by e-mail and phone than they would with people they saw regularly.
• Adopting a single team identity and similar norms (team rules and procedures, work processes, etc.) across locations.
• Learning about the limitations of technology and how to overcome them, including gaining greater expertise with the technology (such as collaboration software) than standard teams bother to get.
• Learning and practicing methods for facing and solving conflicts as a group despite the limitations of technology.

Regular readers will see nothing revolutionary in these suggestions. As my SuddenTeams Program points out, virtual teams need to take the time to create standard goals, codes of conduct, procedures, and work processes just like standard teams. Training and follow-up coaching on software use, e-mail etiquette, and group problem-solving techniques adapted for virtual meetings is vital. And as noted before, virtual teams cannot hand-offs peak performance without occasional face-to-face meetings.

Source: Hinds, P., and D. Bailey (03), "Out of Sight, Out of Sync: Understanding Conflict in Distributed Teams," Organization Science 14(6):615.

BMW Empowers its Way to Mini Performance

Article: Bearing in mind the warnings I have given in the past about success stories, here's one that shows what a genuine commitment to empowered teams can achieve. The BMW Mini automobile has been a great success, and it's the result of what BMW calls "self-steering" teams. A British group, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, awarded its 2003 People Management Award to BMW. The car maker instituted a change program to institute best practices, merge work cultures, and create the new Mini at a British plant of 4,000 workers it had bought. The core element was "the creation of hundreds of 'self-steered' teams of between eight and 15 people" called "Wings" (short for "Working in Groups").

"Wings teams have been given the power to tackle production problems themselves…(and) members also now rotate tasks within their area… In addition, rather than being management-led, the focus is now on initiative and self-management, and employees have received external training and coaching in working as part of a team." The HR director said a lot of responsibility was shifted from management to production teams. This "placed continuous improvement and the acheivement of plant improvement targets directly into the hands of the team members." One person on each team was shifted to half-time production work so the remaining hours can go to "developing their team members and the way their team operates." And every two weeks, the round-the-clock plant shuts down for 45 minutes for team meetings. To emphasize and reinforce management support for the approach, managers and directors spend time on the production line.

Three years later, the head of the car body production line says, people are more enthusiastic, open to sharing ideas, and better informed, and "conversations are no longer negative..." Quantifiable results are equally strong: "Production targets during 2002 were exceeded by more than 60 percent and those changes have contributed to savings of more than £6.3M during the past 12 months."

Application: Even if you can't convert your whole facility to the degree BMW has, there still are some ideas you or your company can implement in smaller fashion to build toward this kind of success:

• Include line workers in all process improvement planning, lessons learned meetings, etc.
• Cross-train workers to increase understanding and empathy, reduce boredom, and ensure work won't come to a halt if one person is out for an extended period.
• Accompany any increases in responsibility with equal increases in authority and the soft- and hard-skills training needed to accomplish the required tasks.
• Set aside worker and team time for team development activities on a regular basis (not just for annual "teambuilding" exercises).
• Find ways to remind upper managers what life is like on the line.

If a plant of 4,000 people can make this work, your company of 25 or 250 certainly can.

Commit to Success Via Teamwork

Many companies talk about employees being their best assets and teamwork a key value, but few put their money where their mouths are. If you're ready to reap the benefits of full commitment to teamwork, whether by way of outside assistance or an on-staff expert, contact Jim Morgan today.

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.

Subscribe/Unsubscribe

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. To:

• Subscribe: Send an e-mail request to info@suddenteams.com from the e-mail address at which you wish to receive newsletter announcements. You will receive a welcoming e-mail to confirm receipt of your request and ensure you were not subscribed against your wishes.
• Unsubscribe: There are two methods, both designed to prevent someone from unsubscribing you against your wishes:
  1. Reply to any TeamResearch announcement e-mail with ?Unsubscribe? in the Subject line.
  2. Send an e-mail request to info@suddenteams.com. You will receive an e-mail at the subscribed address asking for confirmation.

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