Introduction

The importance of groups in organisations has increased over the last few decades. This is because as the nature of tasks carried out by organisations becomes increasingly complex, the traditional system of a boss managing several individuals is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. As a result, organisations are making greater use of groups in various ways: to make decisions as a committee, to increase quality through quality circles, by creating a task force to develop and produce a new product, and so on. While the top and middle levels of management have used groups for a long time, groups have now become increasingly common and important at lower levels of organisations as well.

The news about groups is not all good, however. While we say that ‘Two heads are better than one’, we also acknowledge that ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’. Effective management of groups requires complex skills, which are often in short supply. In this topic we will discuss the factors which make work groups valuable and other factors which make them a source of trouble. We will focus on work teams, their effectiveness, design, internal processes and cohesiveness. The topic concludes with a brief overview of team building.

Objectives

On completion of this topic, you should be able to:

• describe the punctuated-equilibrium model of group development
• identify and discuss six key group properties and their influence on performance
• contrast the benefits and limitations of group decision making
• distinguish between work groups and work teams
• explain the concept of synergy and how this applies to work teams
• identify different types of teams and the challenges associated with managing them
• identify and explain the three key components of effective teams
• evaluate the need to foster and manage diversity within teams.

Approximate study time required

Actively engaging with the lecture content	2 hrs
Topic readings	3 hrs
Undertake the prescribed learning activities	1 hrs
Self-directed topic review	1 hrs
Total	7 hrs

Defining groups

Formally defined, a group is a collection of two or more people who work with each other to achieve a common goal (Wood et al., 2010, p. 202).

Groupwork is common in organisations and ‘groups’ take on many different forms. At the most basic level, groups are comprised of just two people working together on a relatively simple task. At a more complex level, groups can comprise any number of people working on a critically complex task. Although the actual number of people involved in a group can be unlimited, there is often a particular number that results in maximum efficiency. Even for very complex tasks, unity becomes difficult with 20+ individuals and the group will often split into smaller sub-groups.

Stages of group development

Recognising and understanding the particular stages that groups will often go through is a key way of managing its performance and intended outcomes. Every group, regardless of its size and purpose, will evolve throughout the project schedule. Some groups may progress through particular stages of development very quickly, while others, due to the nature of the group mix and complexity of the task, will take much longer.

Group properties

A work group is most effective when its various properties are strategically aligned with the task purpose. The following table provides a quick overview of six key properties associated with most groups.

Property	Description
Roles	The behaviour expected of someone who occupies a particular position within the group
Norm	Established ‘standards of behaviour’ that all group members are expected to comply with
Status	The social ranking of individual group members or the group itself; i.e. as compared with other groups internal and external to the organisation.
Size and dynamics	The number of members in a group and related influence on the group’s overall behaviour.
Cohesiveness	The way in which individual group members work together to achieve the group objective.
Diversity	The range of group member characteristics; e.g. gender, age, race and culture.

Team Dynamics and the concept of ‘Social loafing’

A team’s performance is often assessed on a team basis (and the team may get a bonus if its performance meets or exceeds a certain standard). While this emphasis on measuring the team’s results as a whole has a positive effect on building the team spirit, there is also a downside to this, called ‘social loafing’. Since the results are measured for the team as a whole, rather than for each individual, there is a temptation for individuals to shirk, that is, to not carry their full load. This might suggest that to control social loafing the managers must also provide a system by which individual efforts can be identified. There is an inherent contradiction here, however. If each performer is made identifiable the emphasis on measurement reverts to the individual basis, which can be damaging to the process of building a team and rewarding its performance as a team.

The social loafing phenomenon, which has been observed in many different kinds of situations, shows once again that while concepts like teams and team building sound attractive, the reality may not be so simple as it appears on the surface, and that managers need to think hard about whether and how they want to spend a great deal of effort on designing their work to be carried out on a team basis.

Based on your understanding of social loafing and team performance, do you think that revealing team members’ salaries and bonuses could eliminate some of the issues and conflicts associated with unequal contribution?

Team cohesiveness

Wood et al. (2006, p. 240) views team cohesiveness as ‘the degree to which members are attracted to, and motivated to remain part of, a team’. Team cohesiveness is deemed to be high when the following occurs:

• team members are similar in age, attitudes, needs and backgrounds
• team members have respect for each other’s competencies
• team members share and agree on common goals
• when the team is relatively small
• when the team is physically isolated from other groups
• when the team has success in terms of its performance
• when the team enters a performance crisis or failure.

Group decision making

Like the ‘individual’ decision-making process covered in the previous topic, decision making in groups is far from a straightforward process. While it may initially seem that having multiple individuals provides the best opportunity to identify an effective solution to a problem, this is often not the case. Group decisions can be severely misguided. It is important therefore to understand both the strengths and weaknesses of group decision making.

‘Groupthink’

The pressure to go along with the group is experienced not only by experimental subjects, police officers, and professional team-based athletes, but by almost anyone who belongs to a group. The best known example of this pressure to conform is the so-called Bay of Pigs episode in the Kennedy administration in the USA in 1961. President John F. Kennedy had gathered his top-level advisers to discuss what to do about the plan to invade Cuba which had been prepared by the previous (Eisenhower) administration. Although there were numerous major flaws in the plan, almost nobody wanted to point out those flaws in the discussion. The invasion plan was approved and ended up creating a major disaster for the US government. Irving Janis, who studied this episode and many other similar episodes, coined the phrase ‘Groupthink’ to describe the pressure to conform which is created in a group.

Defining teams

Wood et al. (2007, p. 228) define teams as:

Small groups of people with complementary skills, who work together as a unit to achieve a common purpose for which they hold themselves accountable.

McShane et al. (2013, 9.252) define teams as:

Groups of two or more people who interact with and influence each other, are mutually accountable for achieving common objectives, and perceive themselves as a social entity within an organisation.

Look back over the definition of a group that was presented at the beginning of this topic. Can you recognise the distinction between groups and teams?

A work group is a group that interacts for the main reason to share information and to make decisions that assists each other to undertake tasks in their own areas of responsibility.

Work teams on the other hand create synergy. What is meant by this is that each individual’s efforts in the work team result in something that is greater than the sum of all the team members’ efforts.

Consider the situation in which two students work together on an OB case study report. Both are good students and have a strong understanding of the various OB issues embedded within the case. However, in the process of discussing their knowledge with each other, the two achieve a much deeper level of understanding; which is subsequently incorporated into their report. How does this improvement occur? The comments provided by each student cause the other to pause and reflect on the information. They might then question and challenge their own interpretations. In turn, this process helps to broaden their perspective. Neither student would have reached this deeper level of understanding by working on their own and then simply combining their individual ideas at a later time.

Another case would be two politicians. If each is able to gather one million votes on their own, but together they were able to appeal to 2.5 million voters, their synergy would have produced 500,000 more votes than had they each worked independently. This is the reasoning behind many political alliances and strategic partnerships.

Synergy usually arises when two or more persons with different complementary skills cooperate. The fundamental example is cooperation of employees and team members within organisations. In business, cooperation of people with organisational and technical skills happens frequently and is the basis of much organisational behaviour.

The following text reading discusses in greater detail the difference between groups and teams and lists several types of organisational teams.

Team effectiveness

Most organisations today function using teams as they are flexible and quick to respond to changing environments and conditions. They can form, deploy, re-frame and disband very quickly, allowing organisations to respond quickly to broader contextual changes. The effectiveness of teams is therefore an important consideration. Team effectiveness can be measured by three key areas. The first is achievement of team objectives. The second is the satisfaction and wellbeing of its members and the third is the team’s sustainability.

Wood et al. (2006, p. 230) list the characteristics of effective teams as:

• higher morale
• higher productivity
• greater pride in the job
• greater pride in the organisation.

Effective teams tend to foster interdependence and create the synergy mentioned above.

Creating effective teams

Establishing an effective team is not as easy it may first appear. Many organisations naively believe that workers will enthusiastically commit to a particular project and it is therefore only a matter of combining certain people who possess the right set of skills.

When seeking to develop an effective team, many factors need to be considered. These factors can be grouped according to the following three categories:

• contextual
• team composition
• team process.

Team building

Wood et al. (2006, p. 230) defines team building as ‘a sequence of planned action steps designed to gather and analyse data on the functioning of a group, and to implement changes to increase its operating effectiveness’. Team building aims to foster teamwork so that team members optimise their collective skills to achieve certain goals. Wood et al. (2006, p. 231) view the goals of team building as:

• clarifying core values that guide action and behaviour
• transforming purpose into a more specific focus and performance objectives
• developing the most appropriate skill mix to achieve optimum results
• enhancing creativity in task performance.

Team-building activities can involve formal retreats and outdoor experiences and challenges. Some of you may be aware of the Outward Bound Leadership School which is an example of an outdoor experience where teams are placed in a variety of situations in which they have to engage in collective activities and actions to overcome physical obstacles and tests that are not surmountable by individual efforts alone. Some of you may have even participated in such team-building exercises.

Summary

Teams are an important part of organisations, especially when the task is such that individuals are highly interdependent on each other and when the demands of the task change frequently. A group has various norms, especially about production level, although many of the norms are not explicitly stated anywhere. The more cohesive a team is, the stronger the enforcement of the norms. The norms often prevent introduction of change in a team. On the other hand a team can assist in implementing a change if the change is discussed with the team and agreed to by the team.

Teams usually make better decisions than individuals due to the shared expertise of team members, but only if the merits of various actions can be thoroughly discussed. Such a discussion, however, is difficult to carry out in some teams because of pressure on members to avoid disagreement with each other, sometimes referred to as the groupthink phenomenon. Some teams, on the other hand, find it difficult to act effectively because of conflicts among members. These conflicts can be reduced significantly by encouraging task and maintenance-oriented behaviours among members and discouraging self-oriented behaviours.

Some authors distinguish between a team and a group, and suggest that teams are more cohesive and productive than groups. Many companies have created team-building programs in order to improve the way their groups function. These efforts to build a team may be ineffective unless the task assigned to the teams is significant, rapidly changing and requires a great deal of interdependence among members. In the absence of such tasks, team building can be seen as mere rhetoric, producing cynicism, and suffering from the effects of social loafing.