How and why to design your teams for modern software systems - Agile in Leeds...
Empowerment hypthnov9shortpreso210pm (5)
1. The Empowerment Hypothesis: Control, Collaboration, and Success in Online TeamsAmy Sauers, PhD Lynn Grinnell, PhD Frank Appunn, PhDLarry Mack, DBA St. Petersburg CollegeCollege of Business http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF80RqLkl6E
29. Discussion 8 Factors and Loadings: Empowered Feel empowered in team .85 Feel confident in team .83 No control over team -.74
30. Discussion 8 Factors and Loadings: Conscientiousness (Use of time) I waste my time .74 I shirk .71 I don’t see things through to finish .70
31. Discussion 8 Factors and Loadings: Conscientiousness (Planning) I’m always prepared .72 My chores are done right away .66 I make plans and stick to it .65 I pay attention to detail .62 I carry out plans .60
32. Discussion 8 Factors and Loadings: Trust I trust my teammates .86 I can count on my team .83 My team members are honest .71
34. Discussion 8 Factors and Loadings: Collaboration Collaborated well .89 Good team interaction .89 Mutual benefit to teamwork .85
35. Discussion 8 Factors and Loadings: Satisfaction Satisfied with team effectiveness .88 Satisfied with the team .86 Satisfied with the learning experience .86
36. Discussion 8 Factors and Loadings: Performance/Task Success Teamwork is of high quality .89 Quantity of teamwork meets expectations .87
Welcome! I’m Amy Sauers. I’m so glad to be here today on behalf of my colleagues …Who in here has student teams? Who has or is on online or virtual teams? Do you find online teams more challenging? Why?…As we go through this talk today, I’d like you to picture one team in your mind. It could be a student team or it could be a team that you’re on. Now let’s look at how we did the study…
Overview… I’m going to keep coming back to this overview just so we keep track of where we are. Now remember that team you’ve chosen to think about?… if you could change one thing about that team what would it be? But maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves… If we could know one thing or measure one thing about this team, what would that be? And that was very much the question we asked before embarking on this study…
My research team and I are faculty at St. Petersburg College where we put the students into teams quite a lot. We noticed some of the student teams were having problems and felt frustrated. We had heard stories of social loafers and ruining grades. So we decided to research the problem. After extensive qualitative research, we found that in-person teams were more resilient than online teams. We found that… Many similarities in team issues raisedCommunicationSocial loafingEquityBUT, Blended teams were happierMore positive attitude towards teamsMore satisfiedMore positive about learningBetter communicationAsynchronous nature of online communication gives false sense of 2-way communicationThe key problem we saw became the research prob for this study: what is the key to resilient online teams, teams that not only survive, but actually flourish in the face of adversity?This research is significant b/c Science shows that virtual teams are less effective than face-to-faceteams with less interaction between team members (Potter & Balthazard 2002). With more than ½ of the student population having no other access to education than through the online forum, we can’t wait to figure out how to make this learning experience more effective.
We also noticed that the biggest complaints came from online students who cared very much about the situation. They happened to be on teams with some social loafers. This drove the conscientious ones crazy. And unlike our in-person class teams, no one could look another teammate in the eye and say, “Where’s that work you promised?”The trouble did not seem to come about with a completely non-conscientious bunch; they didn’t care enough. But we really noticed something going on with online teams who had members with varying levels of conscientiousness. We looked to the literature and found that Gevers & Peeters, in their 2009 Journal of Organizational Behavior article, found differing levels of conscientiousness led to team dissatisfaction and even a loss in team effectiveness due to problems in planning out the time for the project. Now that we had an inkling of the phenomenon, we looked to the literature on teams…
In their groundbreaking 1993 book, The Wisdom of Teams, authors Katzenbach andSmith outline the discipline that defines a real team.They stress: “The essence of a team is shared commitment. Without it, groups perform as individuals; with it, they become apowerful unit of collective performance. The best teams invest a tremendous amount of time shaping a purposethat they can own. They also translate their purpose into specific performance goals. And members of successfulteams pitch in and become accountable with and to their teammates…..An effective team is always worth more than the sum of its parts.”We felt fairly comfortable with this understanding of our student teams and turned to the social science findings for more.
Rather than simply measuring performance, our group takes the view of modeling the team as a process. This approach takes a system theoretic view and is standard in the literature on teams where teams are understood via their Inputs-Throughouts-Outputs (Brannick, Salas, & Prince, 1997). The literature on teams suggests how people start out in a team matters. What personality characteristics to members bring to the team? How does leadership affect a team?Next, the team literature has a strong emphasis on communication as central to a team. Communication is the conduit for information and feedback within a team.Last, every manager wants to know that their team is performing – how do we measure success? This basic process model outlines our theoretical background for our study.We also wanted to look to the empowerment literature to see if empowerment could have an effect…
Through our qualitative research, we noticed that individuals who took on a self-leadership role in a dysfunctional team were able to get the team on track. We looked to the locus of control research as a proxy for a team member’s intra-personal empowerment. I’m going to share the literature we reviewed in light of our Process Model understanding of teams to help build our foundation.
Intrapersonal empowerment theory (Zimmerman, et al, 1992) is the perceived control an individual feels that exerts influence over their participation and behavior in group activities. The research has borne out that the intrapersonal empowerment mindset affects behavior. In particular, a lack of a sense of empowerment relates to non-participation in a group. Our study uses Costa, McCrae, and Dye’s conscientiousness scale and operationalization. Conscientiousness is the trait of being careful, self-disciplined, and dutiful and considers how well one is organized, is focused on goals, and is motivated. Conscientious people are focused on competence and order.
Interactions/ collaboration: Dillenbourg P. (1999): Involves creating new value together by working on goals by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus. Collaboration is mutually-beneficial.Emotion: Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, and Lang (2001) & Buck: 1976). Human Motivation and Emotion. :Emotional reactions are organized by underlying motivational states that have evolved to promote the survival of individuals and species.Trust: Rotter’s (1967) trust from social learning theory assumes we will act predictably on the basis of past behavior. Morgan & Hunt (1994): basis for all human transactions; expectation that people will act in a reliable way.
The concept of satisfaction as a construct within the ARCS model of academic motivation was first suggested by John Keller (1987) which stands for Attention,Relevance,Confidence,Satisfaction. He described satisfaction as “positive feelings about one's accomplishments and learning experiences” (Keller, 2000). For Hoegl and Gemuenden (2001), task-related outcomes had three components: quality, adherence to schedule, and adherence to budget. Team Performance has been defined by Fortune and Utley, 2005 as quantity of output, quality of output, resource use, problem-solving capacity, and adaptability.
We’ve covered the problem, we’ve looked at the background literature, next we’ll delve into the key variables and how they’re measured. But, I think this would be a good time to ask, have you started to identify the one thing you wish you could know about your team of choice? … Next is the view of our variables for the study.
These map back fairly cleanly to the variables in the literature on teams, especially online teams in higher education. They are…
Now that we’ve looked at the key variables of study, I want to share how these were operationalized to be measured. We did pretest these and the validity and reliability passed with only a few tweaks.
The process variables are measured as…
The output measures are…
So far, we’ve discussed how the research problem is understanding the functioning process of online teams that are resilient, even in the face of individual differences. We’ve covered the literature background and the key variables and how they’re measured. Now we get into the methods of how the study was carried out and a discussion of results.
Here are some sample questionnaires for this pilot study to test our view of online teams…..We invited our sections and included a surveymonkey link in our courses – there were 80 respondents across 4-5 College of Business course sections…. I can show you the live link for the survey and also some descriptive results of the data.
…. In terms of some descriptive results of the data…... Next, we will move to the discussion.
In order to build a causal model to accurately reflect the data, a factor analysis was done for initial look at construct validation – Principle components with Varimax rotation was used. 8 factors emerged. They are… –I want to share with you what the 8 factors are made of…
EmpoweredConscientiousness (Use of time)Conscientiousness (Planning)TrustEmotionsCollaborationSatisfactionPerformance/Task Success
EmpoweredConscientiousness (Use of time)Conscientiousness (Planning)TrustEmotionsCollaborationSatisfactionPerformance/Task Success
EmpoweredConscientiousness (Use of time)Conscientiousness (Planning)TrustEmotionsCollaborationSatisfactionPerformance/Task Success
EmpoweredConscientiousness (Use of time)Conscientiousness (Planning)TrustEmotionsCollaborationSatisfactionPerformance/Task Success
EmpoweredConscientiousness (Use of time)Conscientiousness (Planning)TrustEmotionsCollaborationSatisfactionPerformance/Task Success
EmpoweredConscientiousness (Use of time)Conscientiousness (Planning)TrustEmotionsCollaborationSatisfactionPerformance/Task Success
EmpoweredConscientiousness (Use of time)Conscientiousness (Planning)TrustEmotionsCollaborationSatisfactionPerformance/Task Success
EmpoweredConscientiousness (Use of time)Conscientiousness (Planning)TrustEmotionsCollaborationSatisfactionPerformance/Task Success
These are separate linear regression runs to get a glimpse of the model we’re building. We will increase our power and run a SEM to confirm our understanding.
What’s next?... How about you? What were some of the key things you wanted to know about your team of choice?
With that, I’d like to open the floor for questions, please…
