What factors
improve team
effectiveness?
According to Hackman’s
model of
team
effectiveness
from his
book
'Leading
Teams' (HBS
Press,
2002), five
factors work
in tandem in
order for a
team to be
successful.
By putting
these in
place,
leaders can
structure &
support
their teams
in a manner
that makes
the team a
more
effective
unit.
Supported by
extensive
research and
real team
experiences, Hackman, Wageman
& Lehman have
devised a
survey that
measures
these five
conditions
that
research
shows are
vital for
team
effective.
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(1) Real
Team:
In general work teams, tend to have four essential factors that
determine whether they are a real team or not. These include the team’s task,
their defined boundaries, their level of authority within the team, and the
stability of members over time. Having a real team involves that the members of
the team are clearly bounded and everyone has a clear idea of who is on the
team, and that they have a particular form of authority to manage their own
work, along with having a general level of stability amongst its members. It
also depends on the type of task the team has, whether it is individual or
shared, independent or interdependent.
(2) Enabling Structure:
The structure of the
team acts like the outer “shell” of the team, and is one of the building blocks
of creating an effective team. The components of an enabling structure for a
team are the task design, the team composition and the team’s norms. The task
design is an important factor as it has to have characteristics such that it
fosters a sense of internal work motivation, by ensuring that the task requires
a variety of skills, is identifiable and is significant, in order to enhance the
experienced meaningfulness (Hackman & Oldham, 1980). The composition of the team
should be that individually members have strong task skills and adequate
interpersonal skills and at that at the group level the team is of the right
size and the right amount of heterogeneity and homogeneity. The last part of the
structure is that the team has a strong set of norms in place that powerfully
shape behavior.
(3) Compelling Direction:
Another extremely
crucial factor in creating the foundations of a successful team is to ensure
that they have a compelling sense of direction with their job, in particular,
signifying that their task is clear, challenging and consequential in order to
motivate, energize and engage the members of the team. The direction should be
set in such a way that while the means aren’t necessarily specified, the ends
must be clearly specified in order to develop self-managed goal-directed work
and avoid situations of anarchy, turn-off or wasted human resources.
(4)
Supportive Organizational Context
While the three aforementioned conditions
are the basic foundations of building a competent team, a team needs to be
reinforced by the organization. This can be done in terms of creating a rewards
system that recognizes and reinforces excellent team performance. It would also
be necessary to build an information system that makes the data required to plan
their team work easily accessible to the members of team, and an educational
system that provides the members with training and technical expertise as when
desired. The team should also be given access to sufficient material resources
that would be required in order to perform their work.
(5)
Expert Coaching:
The last, and probably one of the most significant conditions that
affect the effectiveness of teams is available expert coaching provided to the
team. This contains several sub-factors including the availability and
helpfulness of coaching, the focus of the team leader’s activities, the type and
timing of the coaching provided and level of peer coaching provided amongst the
members. This is key in creating superlative team performances, as it is
possible to judge how much coaches’ time is spent on improving the team's task
processes, reinforcing good behavior, improving members' interpersonal
relations, as well as unhelpful interventions.
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