Chapter 6 (Week 5) Flashcards
Group vs Team
Group: Two or more people with a common relationship.
Team: A group whose individual efforts result in performance that is greater than the sum of the individual inputs.
Groups are teams when:
- members share leadership and accountability
- team develops its own purpose or mission
- team works on problem solving continuously not just at scheduled meeting times
- team’s measure of effectiveness is team’s outcomes/goals not individual outcomes/goals
Types of Teams
FIVE:
- Problem-solving (or process-improvement)
- Self-managed (or self-directed)
- Cross-functional (or project)
- Virtual
- Multiteam
Problem-Solving (Process-Improvement) Team
A group of employees who meet for a few hours each week to discuss ways of improving quality, efficiency, and the work environment
Potential issues: they typically only make recommendations so only effective if their recommendations are implemented
Self-Managed (Self-Directed) Team
A group of 10-15 employees who take on many of the responsibilities of their former managers
Potential Issues:
- Pay gap between women/men on the same team can lead to less willingness to share innovative ideas and groupthink
- lack of training = increase in power struggles and reduced effectiveness when dealing with conflict
- higher absenteeism and turnover rates
Cross-functional (Project) Teams
A group of employees at about the same hierarchical level, but from different work areas, who come together to accomplish a task
Potential Issues:
- leadership ambiguity
- time-consuming to build trust and share complex/diverse ideas among people with varying backgrounds, experiences and perspectives
Virtual Teams
A team that uses computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members in order to achieve a common goal
Potential Issues:
- can be hard to build/maintain trust (one negative remark over email can severely undermine team trust)
- team can be invisible to rest of organization unless efforts & products are shared throughout the org
Multiteam Systems
A collection of two or more interdependent teams that share a superordinate goal; a team of teams.
Best when a team has become too large to be effective or when teams with distinct functions need to be highly coordinated; multiteam leader must lead individual teams and facilitate coordination between teams.
Role
Role: A set of expected behaviours of a person in a given position in a social unit
Norm
Acceptable standards of behaviour within a group that are shared by the group’s members
Likely developed in one of these ways:
- Explicit statement made by a group member
- Critical events in a group’s history
- Primacy (first behavioural pattern that emerges in a group often sets team expectations)
- Carry-over behaviour from past situations (group members bring expectations from previous groups to new groups)
Norms are helpful because they:
- facilitate group’s survival
- increase predictability of group members’ behaviours
- reduce embarrassing interpersonal problems for group members
- allows members to express the central values of the group and clarify what is distinctive about the group’s identity
Deviant workplace behaviour
Voluntary behaviour that violates significant organizational norms and, in so doing, threatens the well-being of the organization or its members.
Also called antisocial behaviour or workplace incivility.
Five-Stage Model of Group Development
- Forming
- Storming
- Norming
- Performing
- Adjourning
Forming
- How do I fit? Why are we here?
- Characterized by uncertainty
Storming
- What’s my role? Who is in charge and who does what?
- Characterized by intragroup conflict
Norming
- What do others expect of me? Can we agree on roles and work as a team?
- Characterized by close relationships and cohesiveness
Performing
- How do I best perform? Can we do the job properly?
- Group is fully functional
