WHY TEAM PERFORMANCE GO SOUR?

Shared from:

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.