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Why Teams Don’t Work
J. Richard Hackman
According to management gurus, teams markedly outperform
individuals, and that self-managing (or self-regulating, or self-directed, or
empowered) teams do best of all. Teams
bring more resources, and more diverse resources, to bear on a task than could
any single performer. Teams composed of
people from different units can transcend traditional functional and organizational
barriers and get members pulling together toward collective objectives. Teams offer the potential for synergy.
Research evidence has found that teams usually do less well than
the sum of their members’ individual contributions. Teams can go sour when:
- · clients are dissatisfied with a team’s work,
- · members become frustrated and disillusioned
- · team becomes ever weaker
Even if a team has clear, engaging direction and an enabling
structure, its performance can go sour, or fall well below the group’s
potential, if it has insufficient organizational support. Teams often start out with great enthusiasm but
then become disillusioned as they encounter frustration after frustration in
trying to obtain the organizational supports they need to accomplish the work.
Mistakes that designers and leaders of work groups sometimes
make:
- 1. Use a Team for Work That Is Better Done by Individuals
- 2. Call the Performing Unit a Team but Really Manage Members as Individuals
- 3. Fall Off the Authority Balance Beam
- 4. Dismantle Existing Organizational Structures So That Teams Will Be Fully “Empowered” to Accomplish the Work
- 5. Specify Challenging Team Objectives, but Skimp on Organizational Supports
- 6. Assume That Members Already Have All the Skills They Need to Work Well as a Team
Creating and launching real teams is not something that can
be accomplished casually.
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