The Model

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.