August 2005
Vol. 3, No. 2
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From the Editor: How do you decide it is time to let go of a team member? This is a question I struggled with for more than a year before reluctantly agreeing with my advisors that the time had come.
Last month, I filed for divorce.
I am not happy about it. My wife is a good person at heart, and part of me still loves her. Perhaps I shouldn't be talking about something this personal in a business publication, but the parallels to teamwork are oddly comforting to me, and those parallels support my oft-repeated argument that relationships are relationships regardless of the setting. Think this through with me…
Before getting married, we took steps to reduce the chances of this happening. After it became clear those steps had not worked as planned, we tried marriage counseling. I also suggested many of the techniques for our "team" that I would have for a business team with similar problems. After all, scientists say that many of the relationship dynamics in a small group are identical to those in the smallest of groups, a "dyad," as they call it: two people.
All of this happens with business teams. You should never want to admit a team relationship isn't going to work. Before a new member comes on, you should interview them carefully, try to communicate the good and bad of joining your team, and maybe try involving them in some test projects. If you have a properly formed team, you convey the values of the team and how it lives its daily life so the person can make an informed decision, and try to determine whether they will benefit from that environment. After deciding to join forces, you work hard to integrate your working styles. After it becomes clear the relationship isn't working as expected, you try to improve the teamwork, possibly bringing in an objective outsider to help you iron out the differences. But if the problems remain, and the conflict remains the kind that hurts everyone involved, the time has come to admit this person is not right for the team, and the team for them. It doesn't mean they are a bad person or worker—just that the two sides will never "fit."
And there I am. I feel all the negative emotions you would expect. But I recognize that our "hiring" process failed on both sides, and our final result was inevitable even before the wedding took place. If you are facing a similar situation in your business team, recognize that the decision to cut a team member should never be an easy one. If it is, you either did a poor job in the hiring process, or are too easily blaming individuals for failures that could be due to your teamwork structure. Have the courage to do what needs to be done, but also look inside to reduce the chance of this sad event ever happening again.
I aim for reporting on four to six articles in each issue of TeamResearch News, and had five picked out this month. But after reading through the fifth, I decided it wasn't strong enough to pass along to you. These professors had, in my opinion, made some mistakes in their methods and misspoken about their results in their advice to managers. So the next time a speaker or writer claims that "Studies say…" this or that, ask yourself how they know those studies are accurate. Then contact me to get the real story about what will help your team succeed.
Article: "Our research demonstrates…that eliminating sexual harassment not only makes good moral and legal sense…it also makes good business sense," according to two professors referring to the first study of the effects of harassment on teams. Previous studies focused on the affects on individuals or the larger organization. What Jana Raver, an organizational behavior specialist at Queen's University, and industrial/organizational psychologist Michele Gelfand of the University of Maryland found is that teams whose members are sexually harassed do not make as much money as expected.
The pair surveyed 203 restaurant workers (70% female) in 27 teams and the team supervisors. The teams were part of the same company, so the same corporate policies and culture affected all, but each team worked only at its own restaurant. The researchers gathered some standard questionnaires that have proven reliable in other studies and covered the following factors (most shown with sample statements from the surveys):
Team members filled out the harassment, conflict and cohesion measures. Their supervisors completed the citizenship questionnaire. The researchers also compared how profitable the teams were versus how profitable they were expected to be, based on their previous year's performance. Be sure to remember the difference between "sexist" and "sexual" as you read the findings.
Sadly, 31 percent of female workers reported having been harassed by either teammates or supervisors. Teams that had high overall levels of sexual hostility were far less likely to hit their profit goals (a correlation of -.42). Overall harassment and unwanted attention were slightly related, but not significantly, to reduced profits. Also:
As the authors point out, this is just a first step. For example, as in this one, other studies have proved that teams with relationship conflict don't perform well. The finding that harassment is linked to more team conflicts suggests there is much more to learn.
Application: Now you have even more ammunition for convincing bosses and teammates to eliminate sex talk in the workplace: it can hurt profits. Raver and Gelfand write, "It is important for team mangers to openly discuss the inappropriateness of harassment and make it clear that all sexually harassing behaviors are forbidden, even mild behaviors that perpetrators think are 'just good fun.' When clear cases of sexual harassment arise, punishment should be swift and severe to…reduce negative implications for teams' performance." They also suggest taking sexual harassment training to the team level, "so that members realize that they may ultimately be harming everyone on their teams when they perpetrate harassment. Team members might then think twice about engaging in such harmful behaviors or might be more willing to confront their fellow team members…"
Regular readers know I strongly recommend that every team create a "Code of Conduct" or similar set of rules for how the members will interact with each other. As part of that code, regardless of whether company policy already addresses sex talk, why not include a rule against it? Some teams ban political and religious talk in the workplace to prevent the possible relationship conflicts those can cause. Even if you think that's going too far, it is hard to believe anyone will take a stand in favor of talking about sex or being able to ask a teammate for a date again after they've been turned down. Surely everyone can control themselves during working hours at least for the sake of team performance, if not for the more important moral and legal reasons.
Source: Raver, J., and M. Gelfand (05), "Beyond the Individual Victim: Linking Sexual Harassment, Team Processes, and Team Performance," Academy of Management Journal 48(3):387.
Study: What a project leader and team do before they even start a project may have a lot to do with their eventual success, according to an investigation by two human resources researchers at Cornell University. Clearly defining the goal of the project, getting the right mix of skills on the team, and giving team members a lot of freedom at the launch meeting seemed to make the difference between three successful and three unsuccessful teams Jeff Ericksen and Lee Dyer intensely studied.
Most studies start with hypotheses and see if the data supports them, but the formation phase of projects has not been studied enough to generate solid hypotheses, Ericksen and Dyer write. Their goal, then, was to generate theory other researchers could build on. To do so, they found six projects getting ready to start at five large corporations (four in the Fortune 500 list) in industries ranging from scientific equipment to furniture. The projects ranged from deciding whether to buy another company to developing e-commerce programs. The researchers then spent an impressive amount of time delving into these teams, conducting 72 half-hour or longer interviews during and after the projects; observing team meetings and other activities for 87 hours; poring over documents like team charters and project plans; plus analyzing 43 survey responses.
Three of the teams completed their projects on time and to high praise from their internal customers. The others failed miserably—one even disbanded before the project deadline. What made the difference?
First, the successful project champions and managers purposely held off on discussing how to complete the project until the team could be involved. Instead, these leaders focused on:
Two of the three failing teams never clarified the project's goals, the leaders working instead on the processes the projects should use. They chose team members based on functions or who the members worked for, rather than looking for people with the necessary skills and knowledge. They rarely consulted other people in preparing for the projects, and when they did, they used people they knew instead of choosing advisors for objective reasons.
At the launch meetings of the strong teams, "members were fully engaged in substantive discussions of project-related issues, including potential products and solutions, and ultimately, collectively prepared work plans and timetables." For, again, two of the unsuccessful teams, the project leader tried to control the meetings. The third team's leader intended that kind of meeting, but a last-minute infusion of information by the project sponsor made it more "participatory." (This raises the question of how effective that meeting was after ineffective preparation by a facilitator who wasn't committed to team participation.)
Because the successful teams' projects were well defined, the teams spent less time completing the project's planning. This, in turn, gave them a much larger percentage of the overall project time to perform the work. Three of the four teams that spent only a third of their total project time on planning succeeded; two of the three failing teams used up half their time planning. (I should point out, though, that teams who spend too little time on planning also tend to fail. The strong teams in this study seemed to hit a happy medium between too little and two much).
Other results included:
Application: This was not the kind of study intended to provide information to managers. Instead the researchers come up with a series of "propositions" (as opposed to "hypotheses") they suggest other scientists use as starting points for further research. However, I have a graduate certificate in project management, so I can tell you where this study fits in with what project management experts preach.
First, the successful projects were well planned. As a true expert in the PM field, Kevin Archbold of Key Consulting, writes on his Web site: "Initial planning is the most vital part of a project. The review of most failed projects indicates the disasters were well planned to happen from the start." The failed projects in this study "planned disaster" by failing to clearly define their goals prior to startup and coming out of launch meetings without schedules showing detailed tasks and assignments.
Next, the teams that succeeded had the right people in terms of knowledge and time commitment. You may have noticed that one of the failed teams did some things right. But its members did not have the skills required to accomplish the project goal, and all of them were part-timers to the project. The successful teams had those factors working for them in addition to the things that one team did not.
The lack of member time dedicated to the project is one sign that upper managers in the companies did not really support the project, a vital element in successful teams of any type. This may well have been because the leaders did not spend time pre-launch in building relationships with other managers and stakeholders. Finally, the successful teams were allowed to plan how the work was accomplished, whereas the leaders of two of three failed teams tried to impose the processes (and it appears the leader of the third was planning to do the same). Especially in projects that involve wading into uncharted waters, the more input the true experts in the work—the team members—are allowed into project work breakdowns and schedules, the more accurate those plans tend to be.
Source: Ericksen, J., and L. Dyer (04), "Right from the Start: Exploring the Effects of Early Team Events on Subsequent Project Team Development and Performance," Administrative Science Quarterly 49:438.
Study: One of the most common excuses managers and workers give for not creating standard procedures is their belief that such formality will "stifle creativity." Not only is there no scientific evidence for this, there apparently had never been a study of the matter before one was published last month. As usual for the assumptions people make, this belief did not hold up to objective scrutiny.
Three scientists teamed up with a human resources director at Siemens Corporation to survey 90 self-managed teams of office equipment service technicians. These 379 employees typically performed their work by themselves, fixing equipment at customers' locations. Yet they still formed more empowered teams than most work groups I've seen. I'll make a point of this team's description because another excuse managers use to avoid empowering teams is that the people all work on their own. In these teams, organized by territory, "members were responsible for deciding how work should be divided, resources allocated, budgets spent, work strategies developed, performance monitored, and new members recruited and trained." They also interacted regularly, in person or by phone, on technical challenges, and "20 percent of their total compensation was based on how well they performed as a collective."
Members were asked how free they were to come up with new solutions, and also how well their procedures were documented and followed. A primary point of interest for me is that teams that had more formal procedures also had higher creativity (at a correlation of +.46). Both creativity and procedures were linked with higher customer satisfaction, according to the company's standard customer surveys, and both were related to better performance. "Performance" was measured using quantifiable metrics: machine reliability after servicing, parts costs, and response time to customer contacts. Also interesting was that satisfaction and performance were not strongly linked.
But the story got more lively when the measures were all combined. For teams that had high levels of standard processes, creativity levels did not seem to matter in the performance measures. But in teams with few process standards, performance went up strongly as creativity did. Customer satisfaction was a different matter. If creativity was low, satisfaction was the same no matter how much the team's processes had been standardized. Highly documented and followed procedures did improve satisfaction at high levels of creativity, though, and high creativity plus low standardization was a bad combination for customers.
Application: On the face of it, these goals do not seem to go together: If you have a lot of procedures everyone has to follow, they can't get creative, right? The authors believe this study shows that creativity and standard procedures not only can coexist, they are in fact essential for top performance. In this case, compared one to one, creativity was much more important to measurable performance than were procedures. But the combination of the two was better, and customers clearly felt uncomfortable when they saw technicians "winging it." Prior studies, looking at the two concepts separately, have found each to help teams improve.
As usual, the trick is knowing when to do what. First, by giving your team the kind of freedom these workers had to control their own destinies, you give them the ability to be creative in creating their procedures, coming up with solutions to their routine challenges that make the most of every member's experience. Second, as I wrote to a software developer last week in my current contract work, there's a reason for the term "standard operating procedure." SOPs are useful for making work go as efficiently as possible in that 80% of the time (for example) that the work is routine. This still allows plenty of room for people to get creative when work throws them a curve, if you empower them to get the job done any (legal and ethical) way they can that pleases customers. And because good SOPs make the routine work go faster, they also free up more of the time creative problem-solving often takes.
Source: Gilson, L., et al. (05), "Creativity and Standardization: Complementary or Conflicting Drivers of Team Effectiveness," Academy of Management Journal 48(3):521.
Article: Plenty of studies have shown that workers who feel they have been treated fairly work harder and better. Some research suggests teams can develop a shared sense of justice that influences their efforts in much the same way. Quinetta Roberson, a human resources professor at Cornell University, and management researcher Jason Colquitt of the University of Florida define "shared team justice as the shared perceptions of team members about how the team as a whole is treated." They recently teamed up to review previous studies and suggest how that shared sense may develop, impact performance, and be impacted by managers.
Scientists who look at how people interact with others within a larger group say the resulting "social networks" can be compared on two primary factors. One is the degree to which subgroups form whose members are treated similarly by other individuals within the group or by outsiders. An example might be three superstars on a professional baseball team. They are treated differently by the fans, media, business managers and team manager, so other members of the team are likely to behave differently with the superstars than they do with the remaining team members. And the superstars undoubtedly communicate with each other differently than they do with anyone outside their subgroup. A second trait of social networks is cohesion, which is how often and how intensely all members of the group interact with each other.
The less a business team is broken into those subgroups, and the more cohesive it is overall, the greater the likelihood that members will develop similar opinions about whether the team is treated fairly. As Roberson and Colquitt put it, "members tend to share their views and opinions and are motivated to agree in their attitudes and behaviors." If teams come up with shared opinions the same way individuals do, managers and members need to be on their guard. According to accepted theory, people draw conclusions based on their earliest experiences with the person whose fairness is in question, and/or use the simplest information available. Once that opinion is formed, it only goes away if new events or information strongly contradict the original views. In other words, as with other kinds of first impressions, the first and most obvious tends to stick. Roberson and Colquitt think a shared sense of justice comes about and stays around much the same way. In fact, since changing a group of minds is harder than changing a single mind, such first impressions are liable to be much more stubborn in team settings than in an individual.
Of course, to develop that shared sense, members must have "shared experiences and common sources of information." That means three major sources known to affect individuals' views of fair treatment would affect team-wide views in this decreasing order of influence:
The lack of a shared sense of justice, or a shared sense that the team was getting "the shaft," would probably hurt team members' attitudes toward being on the team. The authors say justice also could affect behaviors like cooperation, conflict, and "citizenship" as well as task strategies, thus helping or harming team processes. People who feel unfairly treated tend to withdraw their effort and cooperation, and teams might well do the same. Add in the negative impact we know a sense of unfairness has on an individual's performance, and team performance could be more than just "hurt": This could also explain why some teams engage in downright antisocial behaviors like "theft, sabotage, misuse of information, (and) purposeful breaking of key rules."
The authors suggest several factors that could influence whether a team forms a shared, positive opinion about its treatment. Anything that either creates the subgroups discussed above, or impacts the type and number of interactions between members, will make a difference:
Application: My experience and research tell me Roberson and Colquitt are right on target. Fortunately, team members and managers can play active roles in determining a team's sense of shared justice. There are two keys. First, both sides must ensure that in relation to team activities, all members of the team receive the same information, power, and consequences for their actions. Second, both sides can work, separately and together, to make sure everyone on the team is treated appropriately regardless of their individual differences.
Here's an example scenario of that first point. A team member approaches the team manager about something he is working on for the team. The two of them discuss it, the boss gives her opinion, and they communicate that opinion to the team. Does this help or hurt the goal of a shared, positive sense of justice? Well, that depends:
The numbered list above tells you where to focus your efforts. The scenario focuses on the middle factor, interactional justice. More influential are company policies and procedures that affect teams differently. I know I'm about to make a weird connection, but most historians agree that a secondary cause of the American Civil War, after slavery, was the impact of economic laws passed by the U.S. Congress. Tariffs on imported goods helped the Northern states at the expense of the Southern ones, because they protected Northern industries but raised the cost of the goods the more agricultural South accepted in payment for its cotton and tobacco exports. (I'm not saying the South was right about the war, of course, but this illustrates how a policy can affect parts of an organization very differently.) Managers and team members should work together to identify and eliminate unfair policies in the company and thus improve procedural justice.
Team members can take steps to "immunize" against differing opinions of fairness. For one thing, the team can create formal procedures defining when and how members approach the boss on matters affecting other people on the team. Also, when someone says they were treated badly by someone outside the group, or that a company policy is unfair, a healthy team will react by banding together to look into it rather than just dismissing that person's opinion. Even if their conclusions prove faulty, a fair investigation of the issues that led to that person's opinion will do much to build cohesion. It also will create, if nothing else, a reasonable "agreement to disagree" that improves the sense of fair treatment overall.
Source: Roberson, Q., and J. Colquitt (05), "Shared and Configural Justice: A Social Network Model of Justice in Teams," Academy of Management Review 30(3):595.
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 TeamTrainersTM 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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