This document discusses various team interventions. It distinguishes between work groups and teams, noting that teams have a higher commitment to common goals and interdependence. It describes cross-functional teams comprised of individuals from different departments working on shared challenges. Broad team-building interventions focus on diagnosis, task accomplishment, team relationships, and processes. Specific interventions discussed include diagnostic meetings to identify strengths and problems, team-building meetings to improve effectiveness, and techniques like role analysis, role negotiation, and responsibility charting. Conditions for constructive interventions include buy-in from participants and leaders and training team members in skills like feedback and conflict resolution.

1. Team Interventions

2. Distinction between Groups and Teams
A
work group is a number of persons, usually
reporting to a common superiors and having
some face-to-face interaction, who have some
degree of interdependence in carrying out tasks
for the purpose of achieving organizational
goals.
 A team is a small number of people with
complementary skills who are committed to a
common purpose, set of performance goals, and
approach for which they hold themselves
mutually accountable.
 A team is a form of group, but has some
characteristics in greater degree than ordinary
groups, including a higher commitment to
common goals and a higher degree of
interdependency and interaction.

3. Cross-Functional Teams
 Cross-functional
teams are typically
comprised of individuals who have a
functional home base (e.g., design,
manufacturing, marketing, etc) but who meet
regularly to solve ongoing challenges
requiring input from a number of functional
areas
 Cross functional teams may be permanent.
 But temporary teams can also be created to
solve short-term plans.

4. Broad Team Building Interventions
 Interventions
focus on:
Formal Groups (Intact work teams)
Special Groups (Startup teams, special project
teams, cross-functional teams, parallel learning
structures etc)
 Team-building interventions are typically directed
towards four main areas1.
Diagnosis
2.
Task accomplishments
3.
Team relationships
4.
Team and Organization processes

5. Formal Group Diagnostic Meeting
 Purpose:
Conduct a general critique of the
performance of the group and to uncover and
identify problems so that they may be worked
on.
 “Where we are going” and “how we are going”
 After sharing the data throughout the group, next
steps are: discussing the issues, grouping the
issues in terms of themes, and getting a
preliminary look at the next action steps.

6. Formal Group Diagnostic Meeting
 Critique
the team performance
 Identify strengths and problem areas
 Generating data
 The
main purpose is to identify
problems and not solve problems

7. Formal Group Team-Building Meeting
 Goal:
Improving the team’s effectiveness
through better management of task demands,
relationship demands and group processes.
 Group critiques its performance, analyzes its
ways of doing things and develop strategies to
improve its operations.
 Meeting may be called for a special purpose; or
it may primarily be devoted to maintaining and
managing the group’s culture and processes.
 Initiated by the manager in consultation with
the third party.
 Length for the meeting: Anywhere from one to
three days.
 Sessions should be held away from workplace.

8. Gestalt Approach to Team-building
A
form of team building that focuses more on
the individual than the group (Stanley.M.
Herman)
 Based on the premise that persons function as
whole, total organisms and each person
possesses positive and negative
characteristics that must be “owned up to” and
permitted expression.
 Goals of Gestalt therapy are : awareness,
integration, maturation, authenticity, self –
regulation and behavior change.
 The primary thrust is to make the individual
stronger, more authentic, and more in touch
with the individual's own feelings.

9. Techniques and exercises used in Team Building
 Role
Analysis Technique (RAT)
 Designed to clarify role expectations and
obligations of team members to improve team
effectiveness.
 Steps involved in RAT:
1. Analysis of the focal role initiated by focal role
individual.
2. Examination of focal role incumbent’s
expectation of others.
3. Explicating others’ expectations and desired
behaviors of the focal role
4. Focal Role person assumes responsibility for
making a written summary of the role as it has
been defined ( Role Profile)

10. Techniques and exercises used in Team Building



1.
2.
3.
Role Negotiation Technique (Roger Harrison)
Role negotiation technique intervenes directly in
the relationships of power, authority and
influence within the group.
Steps involved in this techniqueContract setting-Consultant sets the climate and
establishes the ground rules.
Issue diagnosis- Individuals think about how
their own effectiveness can be improved if
others change their work behaviors.
Influence trade- Negotiation period in which two
individuals discuss the most important behavior
changes they want from the other and the
changes they are willing to make themselves.

11. Techniques and exercises used in Team Building
 Responsibility
Charting (Beckhard & Harris)
is a technique for improving team functioning
 Responsibility Charting helps to clarify who is
responsible for what on various decisions and
actions.
 “Who is to do what, with what kind of
involvement by others?”
 The process assigns a behavior to each of the
actors opposite each of the issues.
 Four classes of behavior



Responsibility to initiate action
Approval required, or the right to veto
Support of resources
Inform

12. Techniques and exercises used in Team Building
 Ronald
Lippitt
 Visioning is a term used for an intervention in which
group members in one or more organizational
groups develop and/or describes their vision of what
they want the organization to be like in the future.
 The time frame may be anywhere from six months
to five years in the future.
 Various forms of visioning, or the use of mental
imagery or the development of cognitive maps, are
extensively used in strategic planning and in future
search conferences.

13. Techniques and exercises used in Team Building


Force- Field Analysis (Kurt Lewin, 1947)
Involves the following steps






Decide upon a problematic situation you are interested in
improving.
Carefully and completely describe the desired condition.
Identify the forces and factors operating in the current
force field (Pushing towards desired condition and
pushing away from desired condition)
Examine the forces
Execute strategies for moving the equilibrium from the
current condition to the desired condition (By adding
more driving forces, removing restraining forces or both)
Implement action plans that should cause the desired
condition to be realized.
Describe what actions must be taken to stabilize the
equilibrium at the desired condition and implement those
actions.

14. Conditions for Constructive Interventions:
 Participants,
particularly the formal leader, need
to be informed of the nature of the intervention
and largely “buy in” to the process beforehand.
 The team needs some training in effective group
skills.
 Team members need some coaching and
practice in giving constructive feedbacks, in
dealing with a range of feelings including
defensive ones and in processing conflicts.
 The facilitator needs counseling and listening
skills of high order.
 The formal leader needs some coaching to
assure no punitive or retaliatory behavior will be
a consequence of the exercise.

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