Why are teams a useful unit of analysis?
- teams is a useful unit of analysis when people have a heterogeneity of skills and competences , then a team becomes more effective than the most skilled person alone –> diversity of knowledges embedded
- in many contexts we need teams especially in highly interdependent contexts
Why don’t teams always outperform the best individual member?
-expertise recognition and collaboration can be difficult for eg even the expert in the group may not realise they are the expert
- can be affected by many factors other than performance for eg self-confidence
What makes a rowing team?
- strong team identification –> associated with reduced conflict, more trust + members who identify are less likely to free-ride and more likely to place team needs before individual needs
- trust –> critical to team performance on tasks that are interdependent and require coordination
What’s the formula for making a team effective?
opportunityabilitymotivation = performance
What are the 3 things needed to make a team effective ? How does each element affect a team to make it more effective?
- information sharing
- affects opportunity and ability
-driven by psychological safety
- organisational network structure : gatekeepers, boundary spanners, knowledge brokers - diversity of the team
- shared information more likely to take place
- covers more areas of knowledge
- skills-based diversity VS relations-oriented diversity
What are the pros and cons of holacracy?
pros:
- project teams take their own responsibility
- holacracy allows each person to influence the governance of the organisation even if you are not high in the organisation –> feel recognised
- information sharing and access made easier because people belong to a variety of networks since there is no hierarchy
- teams are carefully put together
cons:
- possible inertia : who takes the decisions since there is no hierarchy? problems of bottleneck left unresolved
- large initiatives will be bureaucratic
- logrolling : lack of clarity as to how compensation works
What’s the relation between cognitively diverse and psychologically safe teams?
cognitively diverse and psychologically safe teams make teams more effective and share 4 positive behaviours/emotions in common:
1. oppositional
2.generative
3.defensive
4.uniform
So what separates the best teams from the rest? It turns out that it’s a combination of cognitive diversity and psychological safety.
- Teams high in both traits show curious and encouraging behavior, and also the level of forcefulness and experimentation needed to keep their momentum. - -Teams low in either trait were either too combative (if they were high in cognitive diversity and low in psychological safety) or too prone to group-think (if the reverse was true).
How is Zappos teams different from other traditional teams?
- teams are autonomous and democratic and people just take rounds to explore issues
- leadership is distributed among roles and continuously shift
- complicated to allocate work and compensation
How can we capitalise on diversity?
- determine each person’s abilities and expertise up front
- engage in TEAM BUILDING for members to know each other better and enable info sharing
- foster team norms of openness, mutual respect to generate trust and foster a team identity
-engage in perspective taking
What are 3 types of team conflict and are they beneficial?
- task-based conflict –> can be beneficial
- interpersonal conflict –> always dysfunctional
- process conflict –> usually dysfunctional
What are challenges of virtual teams?
How to manage virtual teams and bring trust?
when is skill-based diversity most beneficial and when is relations-oriented diversity most useful?
- skills-based diversity useful for creative tasks like in innovation and high tech but negative for manufacturing
- relations-oriented diversity useful for service industries but negative in manufacturing and high tech
what are problems with diversity in teams?
- hamper team cohesion
- create conflict and mistrust
- reduce ability to reach consensus and take quick decisions
when is diversity most beneficial?
- diversity is best for non routine and creative tasks eg solving an unseen problem
-during the problem definition stage
