Psychology Chapter 8: Team Dynamics

Chapter Eight: Team Dynamics

• Teams are groups of two or more people who exist to fulfill a purpose, with interdependence and a need for collaboration.
• Teams exhibit mutual accountability and a shared perception of themselves as a team.
• Teamwork is an integral part of the finance industry in Canada and globally.
• Informal groups exist primarily for the benefit of their members, driven by a need to bond, social identity, goal accomplishment, and emotional support.

Learning Objectives

• Define teams and informal groups, explaining why employees join informal groups.
• Analyze the advantages and disadvantages of teams.
• Outline the team effectiveness model and describe how task characteristics, team size, and composition influence effectiveness.
• Examine how team processes (development, norms, roles, cohesion, trust, and mental models) influence team effectiveness.
• Discuss the characteristics and factors needed for successful self-directed and remote teams.
• Identify constraints on team decision-making and strategies to enhance decision-making and creativity within teams.

What are Teams?

• Teams consist of two or more people.
• They exist to fulfill a particular purpose.
• They are interdependent and require collaboration to function effectively.
• Members hold a shared perception of being part of a team.
• Mutual accountability is expected within the team.

Types of Teams

• Permanence: How long the team exists.
• Authority dispersion: Decision-making authority distributed throughout the team.
• Skill diversity: Team members possessing varied skills and knowledge.

Informal Groups

• Informal groups exist to fulfill member needs.
• Reasons for the existence of informal groups include: innate drive to bond, social identity, goal accomplishment, and emotional support.
• Informal groups can benefit organizations, potentially.

Advantages and Challenges of Teams

• Advantages:
  • Better decisions and products.
  • Improved information sharing and coordination.
  • Increased motivation due to team membership.
• Challenges:
  • Individuals sometimes perform better than teams for specific tasks.
  • "Process loss" can occur in teams.
  • "Social loafing" can exist if individual contributions are not monitored effectively.

Social Loafing Causes and Remedies

• Social loafing is more likely when individual performance is hidden or indistinguishable, tasks are perceived as uninteresting or unimportant, or individuals lack motivation to help team goals.
• Minimizing social loafing can be accomplished through smaller teams, measuring individual performance, task specialization, increased job enrichment, and heightened mindfulness related to team responsibilities.

Team Effectiveness Model

• A model for analyzing team effectiveness focusing on various interacting factors, including team design (task characteristics, team size, team composition), team processes (development, norms, roles, cohesion, trust, mental models), and organizational/team environment (communication, leadership, organizational structure, physical space, rewards).
• Accomplishing tasks, fulfilling member needs, and maintaining team survival are key aspects of team effectiveness.

Organization and Team Environment

• The organizational environment also impacts team effectiveness through communication systems, leadership practices, organizational structure, physical work space, and compensation/reward systems.

Levels of Task Interdependence

• Pooled interdependence: Employees share resources, but individual efforts are not directly linked to others' tasks.
• Sequential interdependence: Employees perform tasks in a specific order, with output from one employee becoming input for the next.
• Reciprocal interdependence: Employees work back and forth on the same task, often requiring continuous feedback and coordination.

Team Size

• Smaller teams often are more effective due to: less process loss, greater engagement in teamwork, and faster development.
• However, teams must be large enough for the task to get accomplished.

Team Composition

• Diverse team members provide a wider range of knowledge, skills, perspectives, and values.
• Diverse teams can present advantages such as: expanded views of problems/alternatives, broader knowledge bases, diverse representation.
• Diverse teams might also experience potential disadvantages like slower development and susceptibility to internal conflicts ("faultlines").
• Team members exhibit various behaviours including coordinating, communicating, cooperating, comforting, and resolving conflicts.

Team Processes

• Team processes include activities like cognitive and emotional dynamics, team development, norms, roles, cohesion, trust, and mental models, to shape the team and support its functions during its development.
• Team development is the cornerstone of team processes.

Stages of Team Development

• Stages of team development include: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing, and potentially Adjourning.

Team Norms

• Norms are informal rules and shared expectations that guide team behaviour, aiming to improve team performance, member relationships, predictability, and reduce cognitive overload.
• Developing and changing team norms involves selecting members with preferred values/past behaviour, stating desired norms, providing regular coaching on norms, using rewards, and disbanding dysfunctional teams.

Team Roles

• Team roles are expected behaviors associated with formal or informal positions within a team or organization.
• Both roles and norms define and guide behaviors; roles mostly apply to individual members, whereas norms apply to all.
• Roles can be acquired formally or informally. Team roles include taskwork roles (supporting performance) and teamwork roles (supporting development/dynamics).

Trust in Teams

• Trust involves positive expectations held by one person toward another, or a group, in situations involving risk.
• Trust levels can include Calculus-based (lowest), Knowledge-based, or Identification-based (highest).
• "Swift trust" is initial trust held upon joining a team.

Team Mental Models

• Shared mental models are common understanding and expectations shared by all team members about their team.
• Complementary mental models recognize that team members' mental models might vary, but are still compatible with each other.
• Shared and complementary team mental models improve coordination, establish the team as a functional social entity, and catalogue the team's diversified knowledge.

Team Building

• Team building is a formal activity used to foster better team development processes, and consists of diverse activities such as goal setting, problem-solving, role clarification, and improving interpersonal relationships.

Self-Directed Teams

• Self-directed teams are cross-functional groups that manage and execute entire work processes.
• These teams have autonomy over task decisions and are interdependent, with team members being accountable for the entirety of the task.
• Success depends on factors such as responsibility, high team interdependence, low interdependence with other teams, autonomy in organizing/coordinating tasks, support for team communication/coordination, and job enrichment.

Team Decision-Making Constraints

• Decision-making in teams is constrained by factors such as time limitations, apprehension surrounding performance evaluations, group pressure to conform, and overconfidence in the team's efficacy.

General Guidelines for Team Decisions

• To make effective team decisions, guidelines include avoiding individual dominance, maintaining optimal team size, encouraging confidence without overconfidence, promoting critical thinking through norms, and supporting psychological safety.
• Using team structures that encourage creativity is a critical part of effective team decision-making.

Creative Team Structures: Brainstorming

• Brainstorming, as a creative process, follows guidelines such as open communication, avoiding criticism of ideas, promoting multiple ideas, and building upon existing ideas to stimulate idea generation.
• Effective brainstorming is characterised by skilled facilitators, confident employees, a safe psychological environment, and a focus on maximum creative idea generation, not just idea quantity. Brainstorming's limitations include production blocking and conformity.

Other Creative Team Structures

• Other creative structures include brainwriting (brainstorming without conversation), electronic brainstorming, and nominal group technique (brainwriting with a verbal stage) to improve idea generation, reducing production blocking, apprehension, and conformity in comparison to traditional brainstorming.

This quiz explores the intricacies of team dynamics, covering team definitions, the importance of informal groups, and the effectiveness model. Participants will analyze the roles of teamwork in the finance industry and examine how various factors influence team success, including processes and characteristics of self-directed teams.