Building High Performance Teams

How can we create high performance
teams?
How can team processes be improved?
How can team communications be
improved?
How can team decisions be improved?
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Characteristics of High Performance Teams
 Set a clear and challenging direction.
 Believe in the goals and motivated to work hard to
accomplish them.
 Turn a general sense of purpose into specific objectives.
 Set standards for measuring results and obtain feedback.
 Members have the right mix of technical, problem-solving
and interpersonal skills.

Team Building
Collaborative way to gather and analyze
data about the team’s work. The goal is
improved teamwork and increased team
effectiveness.

Teamwork
Participation by all
members

Formal retreat approach
 Team building occurs during an offsite “retreat.”
Outdoor experience approach
 Members engage in a variety of physically
challenging situations that require teamwork.
Continuous improvement approach
 The manager, team leader, or group members
take responsibility for ongoing team building.

New members may worry about:
Participation
Goals
Control
Relationships
Processes

Distributed leadership
 Sharing of responsibility for meeting group task and
maintenance needs.
Task activities
 Various things members and leaders do that directly
contribute to the performance of important group tasks.
Maintenance activities
 Support the social and interpersonal relationships among
team members.

Disruptive behaviors:
 Bullying and being overly aggressive toward
other members.
 Withdrawing and refusing to cooperate with
others.
 Using the group as a forum for self-confession.
 Talking too much about irrelevant matters.
 Trying to compete for attention and recognition.

Role
 Set of expectations associated with a job or position
on a team.
.
Role ambiguity
Occurs when a person is
uncertain about his or her
role and what is expected.

Role overload
Occurs when too much is expected of the
individual.
Role underload
Occurs when too little is expected of the
individual.

Role conflict
 Occurs when a person
is unable to respond to
role expectations that
conflict with one
another.
 Forms of role conflict
 Intrasender,
Intersender, Person-
role, Inter-role.

Role negotiation
Process for discussing and agreeing upon
what team members expect of one another.
Team members meet to discuss, clarify, and
agree on their individual role expectations
each holds for the other.

Norms
Represent ideas or beliefs about how
members are expected to behave.
Considered rules or standards of conduct
that are supposed to guide members.
Help members to guide their own behavior
and predict what others will do.

Key norms that can have positive or negative
implications.
 Performance norms.
 Ethics norms.
 Organizational and personal pride norms.
 High-achievement norms.
 Support and helpfulness norms.
 Improvement and change norms.

Leaders can
Influence
Norms

Cohesiveness
The degree to which members are attracted
to a group and motivated to remain a part
of it.
There is a strong relationship between
cohesiveness, conformity to group norms,
and performance.

Inter-team dynamics
The relationships between groups
cooperating and competing with one
another.

Ways to achieve positive inter-team dynamics
 Refocusing members on a common enemy or goal.
 Negotiating directly.
 Engaging members, of different teams, in activities
learning how to work cooperatively together.
 Refocusing reward systems to emphasize
contributions to overall organizational performance
and on how much teams help one another.

To assure high performance, team
interaction patterns and communication
networks must be aligned with
interaction patterns and team tasks.
Centralized
Decentralized
Restrictive

Decentralized communication network
Members communicate directly, as needed,
and share information with one another.

Centralized communication network
Team leader acts as a central control point.
Team leader collects and distributes
information among members.
Members work independently. Results are
passed to the team leader and pooled to
create finished product.

Restricted communication network
Subgroups disagree with one another’s
positions.
Poor communication is characteristic of this
type of situation.

Proxemics involves use of space as people
interact.
 Architects and consultants that specialize in office
design help executives create spaces conducive to
intense communication and teamwork needed in
today’s work environment.
 Design of office space, and the size and availability
of meeting rooms can positively impact the
effectiveness of team communication.

Virtual communication networks
 Technology provide numerous
resources for real time
communication.
 Empowers team members to be in
constant electronic contact with one
another or a central database.
 Online team building activities are
critically important to high quality
results.

What innovations in electronic
communication do you predict in your
working lifetime?

Teams make decisions by choosing from alternative
actions.
 Decision by lack of response
 One idea after another is suggested without any
discussion-taking place.
 Decision by authority rule
 The chairperson, manager, or leader makes a decision for
the team.
 Decision by minority rule
 Two or three people are able to dominate or “railroad”
the group into making a decision to which they agree.

 Decision by majority rule
 Formal voting usually takes place, or members may be
polled, publicly or confidentially, to find the majority
viewpoint.
 Decision by consensus
 Discussion leads to one alternative being favored by most
members and the other members agree to support it.
 Decision by unanimity
 All group members agree totally on the course of
action to be taken.

Assets and Liabilities of Consensus and Unanimity
 Advantages:
 More information, knowledge and expertise is applied to solve problem.
 Discussion leads to broader understanding of final decision.
 Increases acceptance and strengthens commitment of members to follow
through and support decision.
 Disadvantages:
 Imperfect decisions may result from social pressures to conform to group,
or undue influence of team leader.
 Team decisions take more time than individual decisions.

Groupthink
The tendency of members in highly cohesive
groups to lose their critical evaluative
capabilities.

Brainstorming
 Used in teams to actively generate as
many ideas and alternatives as possible.
 All criticism is ruled out
 All ideas are welcomed
 Emphasis on creativity and imagination
 Quantity is wanted
 Building on others’ ideas or “piggy-
backing” is encouraged

Think about how team cohesiveness and
groupthink might be related.
Can cohesiveness ever reduce groupthink?
 For example, when there is a cohesive team,
and members are familiar with each other, they
may be less likely to censor their opinions and
more likely to disagree.
 Agree or disagree?

Nominal group technique
Members are asked to respond individually
and in writing to a “nominal” question.

Delphi technique
Involves generating decision-making
alternatives through a series of survey
questionnaires.

Building High Performance Teams

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