TeamResearch News

January 2005
Vol. 2, No. 7

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From the Editor: Recently I was interviewed by a newspaper reporter because of my service last year on a citizens' panel that looked into problems in my county elections office. If you follow U.S. news, you probably know the governor's election here in Washington State has been the tightest in U.S. history. Mistakes made in King County by elections workers have contributed to much of the controversy surrounding it. Because King has the most voters of any county, and those voters tend to back Democrats while the rest of the state leans Republican, fixing those mistakes has changed the apparent outcome of the election.

I told the reporter I would bet money that more than one elections worker made the same mistakes repeatedly. And when that happens, it is not an individual performance problem: it is a system problem. I told him I believe the leaders of the county elections office are ethical men trying to be fair and are very competent in the technical side of elections. But I also know that they have not availed themselves fully of the best expertise in their office: the line workers who know how things are done in practice. The leaders have not sat these people down to document their processes. As far as I know, they have not allowed groups of workers to recommend and implement improvements to those processes. They have not brought in—or developed internally—training experts to create and deliver effective training on those processes.

But, I also said, each of these faults are rampant in most organizations, private and public, including those critical of the elections office. In short, these failures do not make the election leaders bad managers. It makes them typical ones.

Prevent Fires or Always Fight Them

Managers have told me they are too busy "fighting fires" to invest time in team development. But if you don't take the time for fire prevention, you are doomed to spend all your time firefighting. If you want to stop the barrage of fires in your office, contact me today.

Contents

Studies and Articles

• Researchers Debunk HR Myths about Teams
• Managers Can Empower Individuals Without Hurting Teamwork
• Personal Diversity Does Not Have to Cause Conflicts
• Teams that Stop to Reflect are More Innovative

Newsletter Information

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

Researchers Debunk HR Myths about Teams

Article: Many human resources managers do not have accurate information about team building, especially if they rely on HR-focused sources for their information, according to three management researchers. For example, in a 2003 book on human resources management, "only 8 of 750 pages are devoted to team phenomena." So the researchers set out to address gaps between current HR practice and the research literature by correcting nine "myths" about teams in three areas.

Team Composition

When creating teams, technical skills are the most important factor. Scientists have found that teamwork skills such as the following are more important to team performance than job knowledge: "providing feedback, cooperation, communication, team spirit and morale, adaptability, coordination, and accepting feedback."

Team members' average score on a trait is always the best way to decide if you have the right mix of members. If you wanted a team to advise you on a tuition reimbursement program, it might makes sense to have that team have the same level of education as your whole company. So if your employees averaged three years of college, you'd select a team of people with a mix of education levels that averaged out to roughly three years. However, for some types of tasks and traits, the team only performs as well as the worst or best member of the team. If your team was climbing a dangerous mountain, the authors note, you'd want the worst member to nonetheless be an experienced climber. In other cases, variation is the key. For example, teams with a mix of extroverts and introverts tend to perform better than teams with greater similarity on that trait: a team of extroverts would "struggle to control discussions" while one of introverts would "struggle to generate discussions."

Having diverse demographics—differences in age, gender, race, etc.—is important for team performance. In most cases, diversity in physical traits has no effect on group success, and in some it may actually hurt short-term performance (if unaddressed). If there are effects, however, they appear to go away over time. By contrast, diversity in functions, skills, and tenure within a company helps teams succeed over the long term.

Team Training

Team members need to know their own jobs well before joining a team. The authors say that "a series of recent scientific studies shows that training recall, transfer, and post-training team performance actually improve when training occurs within a team context." This happens because of the higher level of support the learner receives, from both team members and the team leader.

A shared view of "the nature of the task and the best way to accomplish it" is not critical to team success. People believe that "unique backgrounds and perspectives" result in better team performance, but research points out that if you do not go to the next step of reconciling those differences, the lack of shared goals "can often interfere with team processes and result in lower overall team performance." Communication and better coordination of effort result when group members ask about and use each other's opinions during decision-making.

Cross-training members to do the work of others, or at least become more familiar with it, does not increase team performance. In jobs with high workloads and interdependence of team tasks, rotating jobs among the members clearly improves team performance. The less the workload, and the less members must cooperate to complete their tasks, the less important this becomes, but few modern jobs have either of those luxuries.

Team Tasks

Successful teams are always self-managed and consist of members who must cooperate to do their individual jobs (who are "interdependent"). Higher interdependence always helps production teams, but for teams focused on planning work, having high or low interdependence works better than moderate levels "by promoting more open communication and less inner-team conflict." Similarly, self-management is more important for planning teams, although production teams also gain from it.

It is not important to consider an individual member's input based on that person's expertise and past accuracy. Although a breadth of perspectives improves team decision-making, fairness does not always require equal treatment. Several studies reviewed in TeamResearch News have shown that teams whose members accurately identify and weigh member expertise perform better than those who can't figure out who does what best.

Individual incentives for performance do not have a place in the team environment. For example, rewarding members for competing with each other helps team speed, and rewarding cooperation enhances decision accuracy.

Application: The authors say HR managers and consultants "will be well served to avoid the pitfalls of intuition and instead rely on research for insights and guideposts to direct their efforts towards team success." Some scientific findings are not obvious, or even go against "gut feelings," but they must be followed if you want to optimize your team's chances for success. To do that, when you:

• Put together a team:
• If given a choice of members, give more weight to people skills than technical ones.
• Think about the range of people skills that might be needed, instead of oversimplifying (for example, though we tend to link extroversion with sales people, a sales team of all extroverts is not necessarily a good idea).
• Don't wait until members are fully trained in their jobs to start the team; support from other members improves learning.
• Press for diversity in your company, you may hurt your case if you claim it will help teamwork—but you can also accurately say that it will not hurt as long as you take the time to properly develop your teams.
• Guide a team:
• Take the time to build consensus behind the team's goal and ensure everyone has the same understanding of it (Hint: They should all have it memorized and explain its meaning in similar terms).
• Cross-train members on each others' jobs, at least to some degree (a marketing person can learn basic bookkeeping, and an accountant can do low-level market research).
• If you aren't comfortable allowing self-management, at least give the team as much decision-making authority as you can (especially planning teams).
• Don't be afraid to weigh the value of a team member's input based on your past experience with their advice, as long as you also give other members an honest hearing and remember that a novice's ideas can stimulate creative solutions.
• Do some research or get some help when deciding the best way to compensate people for teamwork—there is no "one size fits all" solution.

Managers Can Empower Individuals Without Hurting Teamwork

Study: One proven way to improve someone's satisfaction with their job is to slowly make it more challenging as they are ready, giving them more authority and responsibility and increasing the skills needed to succeed. But doing so could clash with the goals of teamwork, which calls for members to give up part of their individual power. An Israeli researcher, Anat Drach-Zahavy of the University of Haifa, surveyed 56 teams of nurses to find out how greater job "enrichment" and greater teamwork interact in the workplace.

Several results match what we knew from previous studies. Teams whose members helped each other performed better than those without good team support, as did those who got more help from their managers. (Team performance was measured by averaging the team manager's ratings of the job performance of each member of the team.) Team-member support, in turn, was higher in teams whose members were culturally oriented toward working together instead of as individuals, and those who paid less attention to a member's job title when interacting.

As the author suspected, on average, job enrichment reduced team support. However, that was not always true. A very supportive leader could wipe out the harm, gaining the benefits of both enrichment and team support simultaneously.

Application: If you are a team manager, you will need to be a "supportive leader" if you want to get the most out of empowered individuals and teams. Drach-Zahavy writes, "Examples are 'being there' for workers when needed, and supporting team members directly as well as indirectly through developing team meetings, team consulting, and team teaching arrangements." Managers can also make sure their words and actions support team togetherness, by means such as making sure all members get the same information at the same time on issues that face the team.

Helping a team develop is exactly like teaching someone to swim. (That is the first kind of training I did, starting at age 14.) You cannot simply empower the team without help and expect them to do anything besides drown. As I helped teach my son to swim, I first got him used to putting his face in the water, then to blowing out, then to putting his whole head in, then to floating. With a business team, you must:

• identify preliminary goals;
• identify the skills and information you would need to achieve those goals;
• develop those skills and provide that information; and then
• give the team the freedom to exercise them and learn from its mistakes.

In the recent history of empowered teams, they have generally failed only when A) they were used in inappropriate situations, or B) they were implemented incorrectly. To help your team win an Olympic swimming medal, you have to first teach basic skills and then keep on coaching.

Personal Diversity Does Not Have to Cause Conflicts

Study: Although conflicts over how to do a task are better for a team than refusing to air differences, relationship conflicts hurt team members and performance. Both common sense and science say the personal differences that cause problems in society—gender and race, for instance—can cause similar "relationship" conflicts in work teams. But it is not inevitable.

For example, in this study two researchers followed the progress of 45 teams of undergraduate and graduate students in seven sections of a course on Total Quality Management. Each team worked over a semester on real-world quality improvement projects for local business, governmental and nonprofit organizations. Team grades were based mostly on sponsor input, a final written report and an oral presentation.

Racial and ethnic diversity were linked to relationship conflicts only in some teams. To the researchers' surprise, two personality traits—extroversion and anxiety over deadlines—also had no effect. When personal conflict did occur, it only made members think their teams performed worse and did not affect actual performance (final grades). Unlike diversity issues, two personal characteristics played a part in conflicts in most of the teams: how much members liked to work with others, and how often members contributed to teamwork.

Application: These findings are not entirely in line with what research involving workers (instead of students) finds. However, I think there was a critical difference. Unlike most business teams, the student teams received extensive training on teamwork skills and were required to put together team charters, "in which they developed a mission statement, a series of ground rules for how they would work together as a team, a list of team member skills, and project goals" as well as project plans. This may have contributed to the fact that diversity in gender, ethnicity, extroversion, and anxiety over time pressures had only weak correlations to the amount of relationship conflict. Workplace studies generally find a stronger connection. I think it also explains why relationship conflict did not lower grades, while workplace team performance is often reduced by personal conflict. Of course, member beliefs that teams in conflict performed worse should not be dismissed just because they were not borne out in objective results: a members who thinks a team is not performing well is likely to lose motivation over time.

Besides taking the time to put into place the key elements of high-performance teams, including the ones listed above, team members can reduce personal conflicts by taking an active role in team processes. This study included the following methods you can try in team meetings or when working with other members:

• "initiating, clarifying, and summarizing"
• "sensing and expressing group feelings and moods"
• "drawing out relevant information"
• "emphasizing results by working on methods"
• "using constructive feedback"
• "sharing personal feelings with the team"
• "encouraging others to express their feelings"
• "involving all members in discussions"
• "encouraging the participation of all members"
• "working in consensus with the group"
• "looking for middle ground"
• "treat(ing) each other with respect"

As noted in the previous articles in this month's issue, managers can also reduce conflicts by selecting team members who enjoy working in teams (when possible) and constantly emphasizing and rewarding cooperation.

Source: Mohammed, S., and L. Angell (04), "Surface- and Deep-Level Diversity in Workgroups: Examining the Moderating Effects of Team Orientation and Team Process on Relationship Conflict," Journal of Organizational Behavior 25:1015.

Teams that Stop to Reflect are More Innovative

Study: We are constantly told that to improve our lives, we need to stop and reflect on the barriers to our success and how we address them. Yet business teams, in my experience, are almost never given the opportunity to examine themselves in this way. A recent study from China suggests this is as big a mistake for a group as it is for a person.

Given the importance of innovation as a tool to help a company stay competitive, I was intrigued by this study because it looked at the link between group self-examination ("reflection") and innovation. One of the best-known teamwork researchers in the world, Dean Tjosvold, and two others surveyed the manager and two employees in each of 100 teams in Shanghai from a wide variety of organizations and industries. Each team's "reflexivity" was measured by how often the team reviewed its objectives, work processes and progress and tried to improve operations. To measure innovation, each manager was asked to rate the team on how actively it sought new skills or ways to apply existing skills to serve company needs.

Sure enough, groups that reflected on their operations were more innovative than those that didn't. As to what caused greater reflexivity, teams whose members tended to compete with each other rather than cooperate were less likely to be reflective, as were (to a lesser degree) those who focused on their individual tasks—that is, who neither cooperated nor competed with other members. Although cooperation by itself (obviously) helps team performance, number-crunching of the survey results showed that reflection was what created the greater innovation.

I think the numbers will help you understand that statement. (But if you really hate math, feel free to skip down to the "Application" section!) Let's say you are going to look at the link between "Item A" and "Item B." A perfect negative "correlation," shown numerically as -1.0 (on a scale of -1.0 to +1.0), means that when Item A goes up one step, Item B goes down one step (and vice versa—correlation by itself does not show which movement causes the other). At the other extreme, a perfect positive correlation of +1.0 means when either item goes up one step, so does the other. A 0.5 correlation would mean that when Item A moves one full step, Item B moves only a half step, while a correlation of 0 would mean there is no connection at all between the movements of the two. In short, the distance of the number from zero shows the strength of the link, and the sign (positive or negative) shows whether the items move in the same or opposite directions.

In this study, the direct link between cooperation and innovation was only +0.12: positive, but not very strong. On the other hand, the correlation between cooperation and reflection was +0.53 (five times stronger), and from reflection to innovation was +0.33 (three times stronger). So the path from cooperation to reflection to innovation was much stronger than the one directly from cooperation to innovation. Only if greater cooperation led to greater reflection did it also lead to much greater innovation.

Application: Even in a country like China where people are more culturally oriented to working toward the good of the group than are people in Western countries, "Teams that develop cooperative goals appear to be in a good position to reflect successfully on their internal workings so that they can continue to innovate," the authors write. You can't help but see a theme in this issue of TeamResearch News: if you use the need for constant "firefighting" as an excuse for not letting your team look at its operations, you are fanning the flames.

If you don't hold regular team meetings now, start, and make them mandatory once a week for an hour. Regardless, in your next team meeting, choose a work process the team uses each day and have the members create a detailed flow chart of it, leaving no step out no matter how minute. In the next meeting, ask them how to improve the process. In the third, create an action plan for implementing their changes, preferably with help from a trained project manager. And make sure the last date on the plan is for a meeting to evaluate the success of the changes three months after they have been implemented. I am positive that at that progress meeting, you will document positive results and be eager to tackle another process.

Source: Tjosvold, D., M. Tang, and M. West (04), "Reflexivity for Team Innovation in China," Group and Organization Management 29(5):540.

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). Learn how to subscribe below and see the newsletter Web 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
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