The world of work is rapidly changing. The signs of this change are increasingly evident: Work is global and diverse; the workforce is aging; the tasks and processes are technology driven; employees are organized to foster collaboration and teamwork; modern successes require fast learning and adaptation. Given this shift in how organizations function, employee–organization relationships (EORs) matter now more than ever. The mutual dependency that exists among these entities ensures organizational viability and survival so long as this relationship is positive. To this end, some organizations create and manage work teams as a strategy to strengthen the EOR. Work teams have become a way of life in many organizations.
Indeed, promoting teamwork has become a national obsession in both the public and private sectors. Teams are assigned to tasks ranging from those with life-and-death stakes at play to those with decisions affecting thousands of people. Teams are composed and (over) applied at ever increasing rates in organizations. In settings as varied as hospitals (e.g., surgical and emergency teams), corporate boardrooms (e.g., top management teams), airlines (e.g., flight teams), oil rigs (e.g., off-shore and on-shore teams), military operations (e.g., reconstruction teams), and financial entrepreneurs (e.g., research analysts), teams are an overarching mechanism underlying organizational effectiveness. Teams are the agents that work to minimize errors, save lives, and improve livelihoods, and we will argue that the EOR is at the center of this. That is, teams are embedded in organizations and, therefore, influenced by what organizations value and promote. At the end of the day, it is the EOR that will make or break teamwork. Note that by the EOR we mean a form of intraorganizational relationship that is perceptual in nature. We are not specifically envisioning a more formal or contractual relationship. However, we do acknowledge that some organizations do formally implement team-based projects and/or management. As such, there may be a distal connection to a more formal type of EOR.
Given the proliferation of teams in industry, it is gratifying to see the scientific community working to ensure that teams are effective. Concomitant with the growth of teams in industry is research into the science of team-work. Over the past two decades, the scientific community has generated a wealth of information about teams. We now know about what influences teamwork, how to measure teamwork, how to track teamwork, and what effective teams do (and how they do it). From this, organizations continually assume that teams are serving them well. But how do they know this? Do organizations understand how teams work, how to make them work well, and how to know if they are succeeding? We suggest that, despite the wealth of knowledge about work teams, there are a number of myths and misconceptions about the power of teamwork and that these hinder effective EOR. Following Shore et al. (2004), we define the EOR as “an overarching term to describe the relationship between the employee and the organization” (p. 292). As an umbrella term, this encompasses both micro- and macro-level factors. In this chapter, we emphasize how meso-level factors (specifically, teamwork) can impact the EOR. Developing organizational structures (cf. Grunig, 1992) based on teamwork can provide an important environment for empowering employees (e.g., decentralizing decision making; product/service ownership). Further, within teams, employees are more likely to see the type of symmetrical communications that are argued to support employee satisfaction (Grunig, Grunig, & Dozier, 2002). With this as our stepping off point, in this chapter, we will outline a set of myths about teamwork, discuss why they exist, and detail the realities of teams. First, we will highlight the many theories that guide teamwork research, extracting the main themes that emerge from this body. Next, we will discuss the myths that keep teams from reaching their potential in organizations (Table 20.1). Finally, we will discuss how organizations can foster effective teamwork and work to counter these myths.
Teams and teamwork have been extensively studied by the psychology and management research communities. For the most part, the field now agrees on what teams and teamwork represent. A team is a distinguishable set of two or more people with specific roles or functions to perform who interact dynamically, interdependently, and adaptively in pursuit of a shared goal or outcome, during a limited lifespan of membership (Salas, Dickinson, Converse, & Tannenbaum, 1992). In more simple terms, a team is a group of people who work together toward the same goal while supporting each other. Teamwork, then, is a multidimensional construct that describes how individuals in the team work together. As a rather high-level construct, it is composed of the behavior, attitudes, and cognitions involved in working as part of a team, including mutual monitoring, feedback, back-up behavior, communication, coordination, trust, and planning (Salas, Burke, & Cannon-Bowers, 2000).
Best Practices for Training and Supporting Teamwork in Organizations
| Best Practice | Area | Relationship | Source |
The team to be trained should possess collective efficacy, collective orientation, and positive attitudes toward teamwork. |
Teamwork Training |
E-T | Holton & Baldwin, 2003 |
Team training should be relevant, be demonstrative, involve practice, and have feedback. |
Teamwork Training |
E-T | Cannon-Bowers & Bowers, 2011 |
The most empirically effective teamwork training interventions are team self-correction training, team coordination and adaptation training, and generic teamwork skills training. |
Teamwork Training |
E-T | Cannon-Bowers & Bowers, 2011 |
The organization should periodically “refresh” team training. |
Teamwork Training |
T-O | Holton & Baldwin, 2003 |
Organizations should train teamwork KSAs as part of their internal development. |
Teamwork Training |
E-T | Stevens & Campion, 1994 |
The organization should encourage a climate of teamwork. |
Organizational Policy |
T-O | Holton & Baldwin, 2003 |
Goals for tasks assigned to teams should be phrased in terms of the team. |
Organizational Policy |
T-O | Holton & Baldwin, 2003 |
Performance appraisals should emphasize teamwork and collective achievement. |
Organizational Policy |
T-O | Holton & Baldwin, 2003 |
Promotion criteria should consider opportunities to develop teamwork skills. |
Compensation/Advancement |
E-O | Stevens & Campion, 1994 |
Teamwork ability should be considered in advancement decisions. |
Compensation/Advancement |
E-O | Stevens & Campion, 1994 |
Compensation should reflect teamwork KSAs |
Compensation/Advancement |
E-O | Stevens & Campion, 1994 |
E-O, employee–organization; E-T, employee–team; KSA, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and abilities; T-O, team–organization.
Given this definition, it is clear that there is quite a lot to understand about teams. Thankfully, the scientific community has risen to the challenge of illuminating these processes and characteristics. Some of the most fruitful research has been in the area of team mental models. As the EOR is traditionally viewed along the lines of an individual employee's relationship with the organization, team mental model theory provides a potential entry point for conceptualizations of the EOR that consider the employee-team. Team mental model research examines the similarities and differences in how teams conceptualize not only their work and the knowledge they hold and share, but also each other. This line of research is strongly related to team cognition research (Salas & Fiore, 2004), which studies the team almost as though it were an individual itself (e.g., by examining a team's cognitions and behaviors instead of those of the individuals). By studying the communication, coordination, and emergent behaviors of a team, it is possible to characterize the team's performance in depth. Beyond studying how teams work from a cognitive standpoint, a plethora of research has been conducted examining the behaviors teams engage in, the differences between teamwork and taskwork, the relationships between individuals in a team, and the characteristics of a team that lead to successful work. These various research efforts have resulted in a strong core of scientific knowledge on teams. Today, we know what skill dimensions are involved in teamwork (Cannon-Bowers, Tannenbaum, Salas, & Volpe, 1995), the competencies required for effective teamwork (Salas et al., 2000), and have principles for how teams interact successfully (Salas et al., 2000).
Although it is all well and good that the scientific community has produced so much useful knowledge regarding teams, the question for organizations is, “Why do we care?” Naturally, the modern reality of engaging in teamwork necessitates an understanding of teams and team-work. It is only reasonable that organizations should care about understanding the science of teams for the simple fact that they want their teams to succeed. However, organizations must also integrate this information into their existing knowledge structures and approaches. It is not enough to merely know how teams work. Organizations must transform themselves based on this knowledge. For example, organizations benefit from an understanding of teams when this understanding is integrated into their approach to the EOR. If teams are becoming the primary agents of organizations, then the EOR is no longer simply about the organization and the individual employee. Instead, the “employee” in the EOR can be viewed as the collective of employees—the teams that the organization empowers to accomplish its goals. Essentially, by moving the level of analysis to “teams,” we suggest that we can expand how organizational researchers conceptualize the EOR. Indeed, organizational research on EOR has suggested that employees can respond favorably when employers direct them toward group levels of performance (Tsui, Pearce, Porter, & Tripoli, 1997). With this focus, we suggest that it may be possible to examine additional antecedent and consequent factors driving employee satisfaction and organizational performance. Thus, the concept of the EOR must move beyond the employee and the organization and toward a more complex understanding of the employee–team–organization relationship. We suggest that understanding the relationship between employees, teams, and the organization should form the next frontier of EOR research. However, because teams and teamwork are overused concepts in many organizations, we next provide some important insights about them. In particular, to properly work with teams, the organization must consider how it trains, supports, rewards, and otherwise uses teams. Central to a modern understanding of the EOR, then, is an understanding of teams and their relationship to the organization.
Unfortunately, despite the considerable scientific knowledge base regarding teams and teamwork, organizations still hold a number of misconceptions about teamwork. These persistent myths continue to plague organizations and impair their ability to effectively harness teams. This, in turn, hinders the development of team-centric EORs—what we have conceptualized as a more meso-level organizational structure. In this context, we suggest that the interconnections with in the team moderate the connections to the organization as a whole. In particular, to the degree that teams are allowed to foster a sense of autonomy (e.g., enabled to make decisions) and feel ownership toward their work (e.g., adapt and innovate as they see necessary), their relationship with the organization may improve (e.g., enhanced motivation, greater satisfaction). To support organizations in building their team-centric EOR, we provide an overview of the myths and realities of teamwork.
It is almost ludicrous to ask whether organizations know what teamwork is. Of course organizations know what teamwork is! Teamwork is when you get a group of individuals to work toward the same goal. Except that this really is not the full story. Although this may be a working layperson's definition of teamwork, it actually describes a narrow aspect of the structure that defines a team rather than teamwork. Two or more people working together may be called a team, but the teamwork these individuals use to coordinate their efforts, cooperate over time, and communicate is what determines whether they are good at being a team: “It is equally true that a set of two or more individuals who are expected and required to interact dynamically, interdependently, and adaptively to accomplish their goals but do not are still a team—they are simply an ineffective team” (Stout, Salas, & Fowlkes, 1997, p. 170). So do organizations know what teamwork is? Taking organizations as a whole, the answer is, “not quite.”
Although teams are easy to grasp at the most basic level, they are difficult to truly understand. The industrial–organizational psychology literature is full of definitions of what exactly constitutes a team (Salas, Sims, & Burke, 2005). For our purposes, the definition of a team as two or more interdependent individuals striving toward the same goal works well because it encompasses a diverse range of potential team contexts. If we know what a team is, then where does that leave teamwork? As noted earlier, teamwork is a rather complicated construct, encompassing a variety of skills and behaviors. Teamwork includes adaptability, shared situational awareness, performance monitoring and feedback, leadership and management, interpersonal relations, coordination, communication, and decision making (Salas et al., 2000). This multidimensional definition is a far cry from simply “the work that teams do.”
Although research has identified what teamwork is, it is not clear that organizations have paid attention to this. Because failure to attend to team “work” can have a cascading effect on other organizational outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction), a team-centric view of the EOR would help the field address how to understand and improve team-based structures. In particular, by emphasizing not just taskwork but also teamwork, organizations may be able to improve the EOR. Examples from the “real world” illustrate how failures to attend to the more interpersonal aspects of teams can have negative consequences. When Volvo implemented a new team-based work plan in its bus plant, it drew on the science of teams to improve its efficiency and profitability. However, the team training program focused on instilling how individuals should work in particular situations rather than training them on how to work in a team (Oudhuis, 2004). By focusing on task-oriented skills in specific situations, this approach was not, in reality, helping trainees to develop the transportable teamwork knowledge, skills, attitudes, and abilities necessary for effective teamwork. Because of the plan's lack of teamwork considerations, it was largely ineffective in improving the organization's productivity.
The implications of subscribing to this myth are straightforward. How can an organization encourage teamwork if it does not understand the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that effective teamwork truly entails? Organizations benefit when teams are properly implemented with effective teamwork training. Just as examples from the “real world” highlight the perils of misappropriating the term “teamwork,” they also show how effective use of teamwork can benefit organizations. In the medical domain, the TeamSTEPPS (Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety) team interaction method (a set of behaviors and tools used to guide teamwork) has been especially successful. Here we have an example of an effective translation from the science of teams to practical applications that are easily adopted by practitioners. For example, the Orange County Kaiser hospital system applied the TeamSTEPPS's SBAR tool (which prompts for descriptions of the situation, background, assessment, and recommendation) to improve its patient handoff, information exchange, and prescription checking (Leonard, Graham, & Bonacum, 2004). Leonard and colleagues further find the positive response from those in complex environments when standardized tools for improvement can be embedded with in the organizational context. Similar examples of using teamwork training and applying team interaction paradigms can be found throughout other domains. Through gaining an understanding of teamwork, these organizations have empowered their efforts to enhance teamwork. By providing team members with the methods and tools they need for training and development, organizations are able to delegate responsibility for performance improvement. Teams are then able to determine how and when to implement these methods, providing them with a level of autonomy that can improve the EOR.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that organizations that rely on teams know how to make their teams work well. They would not be team organizations if they did not practice good teamwork, right? Unfortunately, even organizations that are intensely team driven are often deficient in their handling of teams. After all, how can organizations foster teamwork if they do not understand the science thereof? Indeed, organizations that try to support teamwork may shoot themselves in the foot by implementing seemingly useful team programs while failing to change their management principles or neglecting to implement teamwork training.
For example, when StitchCo shifted from a piecework payment system (which rewarded individual output) to a team payment system (which rewarded overall profitability), it encountered drastic problems with teams not communicating and interfacing with each other (Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998). The use of profitability as the sole metric of success resulted in an environment in which teams were striving to reduce costs without regarding the impact their actions would have on other work teams. The pursuit of individual team profitability became more important than good inter-team behaviors. This benefited individual teams but was nearly disastrous for the organization as a whole (Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998). Additionally, StitchCo's use of a team reward structure was inconsistent with the relationship that individual machinists had built up with in the organization and resulted in considerable friction. The organization did not properly consider how the notion of the team fit into the existing EOR. Although the intent of these changes was to create self-managing teams capable of mutual monitoring and to reduce “slacking,” the end result of StitchCo's changes was that its teamwork initiative disincentivized individual effort and rewarded loafing. Because the organization failed to account for the climate of the organization and its workers, the introduction of teamwork became an imposition rather than an effective reform.
Just because organizations do not always deliver on their attempts to foster teamwork does not mean that teamwork is a flawed approach. As noted earlier, healthcare is one example where successful teamwork training abounds. The aviation domain has also met with considerable success in its efforts to encourage teamwork. For example, crew resource management (CRM) efforts have been used to train aviation teams to apply more teamwork skills and behaviors than untrained teams (Salas, Fowlkes, Stout, Milanovich, & Prince, 1999). Aviation teams are some of the most safe and successful teams in the world, largely due to their effective team training and teamwork processes. Although it is true that not all organizations know how to foster teamwork, some do. Other organizations are able to mirror these successes by applying team science in supporting and training teams.
One might expect that, as team researchers, we would espouse teams as the universal solution to all of an organization's problems. Teams are the tools we are in the business of researching and training. However, despite the evidence showing the efficacy of teams in organizations, teams are not always better than individual workers. Teams are organizational tools, a means by which to organize individuals to specific means. The same tool is not appropriate for every job. Although teams are certainly effective agents of organizational work, there are situations where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. For some tasks, such as those that have less demonstrably “correct” answers, teams only achieve the level of their second-best individual workers (Laughlin, Bonner, & Miner, 2002). These tasks include more abstract problem solving, survival problems, and analogy problems. Whereas teams in more concrete problems perform at the level of their best individual contributor, something about these kinds of tasks makes teams less useful for them. This may be the result of group memory being simultaneously helpful and harmful—the collective memory of a team will include both useful information and large amounts of distractor data, failed plans, and aborted strategies (Smith, Bushouse, & Lord, 2010).
In tasks with extremely high cognitive demands, teams may simply not be able to engage in teamwork successfully. For example, when performing a military radar identification task, teams may find it difficult to perform the skills that are part of teamwork; because of the difficulty and stress of the task, feedback, communication, coordination, and other teamwork skills suffer (Hinsz, 2009). Although work teams are a useful way to organize individuals toward different goals, there are situations in which they are not appropriate. Part of knowing how to foster and apply teamwork is recognizing when teams are not warranted.
An organization has taken the leap—it has created teams, has put in efforts to train them, and has paid attention to when they are appropriate to use. However, this organization needs to consider the relationship the organization has with these teams. How will it support them? Does it understand the different kinds of support different team types need? Even when individuals are empowered to work in teams and have been trained on how to engage in effective teamwork, their success in any given team is contingent upon external factors. Work teams composed of the same individuals will behave and function in very different ways when their tasks or contexts are changed. In any given organization, teams are likely to fall into a range of potential types including, for example, production, service, management, project, action, and parallel teams, all of which may operate in different ways (e.g., Sundstrom, 1999). These team types are further differentiated based on their level of authority, their lifespan, their degree of specialization and autonomy, and their interdependence (Salas et al., 2000). Given the varied possible combinations of the above factors, organizational support to manage the EOR would vary. For example, production teams with lower authority and a limited lifespan might respond more favorably to incentive-based practices, whereas action teams with a longer lifespan might be encouraged by task enrichment or ownership.
Naturally, the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and abilities (KSAs) required of teams working in different contexts will differ. Some KSAs are task specific, whereas others can be used throughout different kinds of taskwork. Similarly, some KSAs are team specific, whereas others apply to work with any sort of team (Salas et al., 2000). Even the interdependence of teams (and individuals in teams) can be broken down into different modes of interaction (Saavedra, Early, & Van Dyne, 1993). With so many different ways to understand the character of any given team, it is easy to see how comparing two widely disparate teams would be comparing apples to oranges.
What does this mean for an organization? Different teams have different requirements. It is not enough to merely have teams composed of individuals who understand teamwork. Failing to address this can have negative consequences viewed through the lens of team–member exchange. This is defined as an “individual member's perception of his or her exchange relationship with the peer group as a whole” (Seers, 1989, p. 119), where the quality of the relationships, both task and social, can impact team members. To the degree there is a mismatch between, for example, team member KSAs and task needs, this could negatively affect the exchange relationship. For example, inadequate KSAs produce performance asymmetries within the team, thus attenuating the quality of the interaction on both social and task levels. An organization must support and empower teams based on their specific requirements and capabilities. For example, product development teams may perform more effectively when virtually distributed (and supported with collaboration tools) than when working face to face (Schmidt, Montoya-Weiss, & Massey, 2001). By supporting a team based on its characteristics, organizations can improve team effectiveness. Further, organizations moving to team-based structures must take into consideration the capabilities of existing personnel and weigh that against task versus training needs. For example, training investments (cf. Tsui et al., 1997) to move incumbents to a team-based structure must take into account KSA requirements along with existing employee capabilities. If incumbent capability is below some threshold, training may not produce the expected return. However, the situation becomes more complicated when considering complex tasks requiring multifunctional teams. For example, if a team task requires complementary skills, investments in training may be worthwhile in that improvement may be possible for enough members of a team to overcome the limitations of other team members.
Naturally, an organization investing in a team is contingent upon an expectation of return. The primary relationship an organization and its teams share, after all, is one of reciprocal support. An organization empowers a team and provides it with resources so that the team may accomplish the goals of the organization. The characteristics of the team, however, dictate what support a team requires. The relationship between a team and an organization cannot be one-way;the team must provide an organization not only with work but also with requests regarding what the team needs. Thus, teams that take on varying responsibilities are more likely to need to communicate to the organization what their requirements are. Teams that consistently perform the same actions will not require as much support-request communication with the organization. Regardless of the team's context, however, an organization can improve team effectiveness by ensuring that a team's particular needs are met.
Communication is an important component of teamwork (Salas et al., 2005), but that is exactly what it is—a component. There is more to a team than individuals who can effectively communicate to each other, and of course, there is more to fostering teamwork than training communication skills. Indeed, under the “Big Five” conceptualization, communication is merely the coordinative mechanism by which team leadership, mutual performance monitoring, back-up behavior, adaptability, and team effectiveness manifest (Salas et al., 2005). Although you need communication for much of the Big Five to “work,” simply having good communication is not what makes teamwork effective. The most generic teamwork skill dimensions and competencies are very much driven by communication (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1995), but other concepts such as interdependence, mutual monitoring, team mental models, and trust define the true character of a team (Salas et al., 2005). In other words, teamwork involves communication but is not defined by it. Indeed, when teams work under high degrees of stress, communication tends to drop off. For teams to be successful under such circumstances, they mostly coordinate their efforts implicitly rather than explicitly communicate intent and status (Kleinman & Serfaty, 1989). Importantly, when considering our team-centric view of the EOR, an important area of inquiry is how inter- versus intrateam communication affects organizational outcomes. In this regard, there are at least four conceptualizations of effective and ineffective communication patterns. For example, there may be effective with in-team communications but ineffective communications between the team and the organization as a whole. There may also be ineffective with in-team communication, but effective communications between the team and the organization. Although work in “multiteam systems” is beginning to examine some of these forms of communication (see Marks, DeChurch, Mathieu, Panzer, & Alonso, 2005), this remains an underexamined issue in team research. As such, exploring these patterns of communication and their impact on the EOR would strengthen both theory and practice.
The myth of the “natural” team player is perhaps the most insidious piece of team misinformation still coursing through organizations. If team players (i.e., people who work well in teams) were born rather than made, selection would form the core of industrial–organizational psychology. However, we know from the wide team training literature base that it is possible to train teamwork behaviors. Indeed, a major portion of the research into teams has focused on how exactly to ensure individuals are able to exhibit various teamwork skills. The field has investigated the KSAs required for teamwork (Stevens & Campion, 1994). Further, the necessity of a teamwork mental model (i.e., a model of how to engage in team-work) is echoed throughout the literature base (Smith-Jentsch, Campbell, Milanovich, & Reynolds, 2001).
Because it is possible to train individuals to become effective team members, this myth is especially dangerous. Further, because managerial practices can foster teamwork, organizations can also focus on implementation of particular policies to help teams. This includes, for example, management support for team autonomy (e.g., no micromanagement of a team's work) as well as appropriately devised reward packages recognizing team contributions. Organizations that subscribe to the “natural leader” theory of leadership or the natural team player mentality limit their own growth by denying their workforce the team training they require to become competent team workers.
Many of the myths we have discussed so far deal with organizations that already use teams for various tasks. However, we must also consider organizations that are just beginning to use teams. Despite the complexity of teams as a concept, the organizational approach to establishing team-work and creating a team environment is often inadequate, especially with regard to using approaches informed by science. For every organizational teamwork success story, there are failures to match. If teamwork were easy to create, high-profile companies would not invest considerable capital only to emerge with an unsuccessful, but implemented, teamwork paradigm.
Creating an effective teamwork environment is not as simple as assigning a group of people to work together. The myths we have discussed thus far have made this more than apparent. As we have noted, each particular instance of teamwork takes place in a potentially unique context. Different teams engage in different kinds of teamwork and taskwork. Creating a teamwork environment, then, cannot be successfully accomplished without considering teamwork alongside the context in which it is taking place (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1995). Thankfully, there are best practices that organizations can follow. The extant base of empirical research has resulted in a number of useful reviews of teamwork interventions. Best practices drawn from these reviews are presented in Table 20.1.
Teamwork is complicated. Teamwork situated within the context of an organization is even more complex: The relationships between the employees, teams, and organizations create a web of considerations. It is not unexpected, then, that measuring teamwork is a tricky prospect. Although we can train teams to work well and we can investigate how different skills and behaviors manifest themselves in teamwork, these advances have not come easily. Part of this difficulty in reaching a mature team science is the result of the complexity of measuring teamwork. However, organizations today are lucky. The most difficult work of figuring out how to examine and measure teamwork has been done for them. Today, team-work processes, cognition, communication, and attitude can be measured through established tools. For measuring teamwork processes, tools such as TARGETs (Targeted Acceptable Responses to Generated Events or Tasks) and other behavioral taxonomies can make measuring successful teamwork as simple as checking items on a list (e.g., Fowlkes, Lane, Salas, Franz, & Oser, 1994). Cognitive measures such as concept mapping, card sorting, pathfinder, or SAGAT (Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique) can be used to probe mental models, situation awareness, and other “in the head” concepts (for a review, see Cooke, 1999; Cooke, Salas, Cannon-Bowers, & Stout, 2000; and Mohammed, Klimoski, & Rentsch, 2000). Measures of collective efficacy or cohesion can be used to examine a team's attitudes (e.g., Paskevich, Brawley, Dorsch, & Widmeyer, 1999). Even traditionally complicated communication analysis is made much more accessible through the development of new tools such as latent semantic analysis (e.g., Kiekel, Cooke, Foltz, Gorman, & Martin, 2002; Landauer, Foltz, & Laham, 1998).
These measurement instruments have been applied in very specific settings. The critical issue is how they can be used to benefit a team-centric view of the EOR. For example, can improved management practices be developed that use such measures? Can more systematically applied team and individual reward systems be put in place through adaptations of these measures? In short, although much research needs to be done, the bottom line is that organizations seeking to measure teamwork need only apply what has already been created by the field.
Intuitively, a team whose members share the same culture should perform better, and of course, a team that brings different cultural viewpoints to the table should also perform better. Both of these beliefs cannot be true at the same time; yet, culture in teams remains so misunderstood that these two competing beliefs are pervasive. What is the reality of culture and teams? Well, as with so much of psychology, the relationship depends on context. It is true that culturally homogenous teams perform better. Simultaneously, it is true that culturally heterogenous teams can perform just as well as culturally homogenous teams. How can this be the case? This seeming paradox exists in work teams due to the complexity of culture. Culture cannot simply be defined by the ethnic or national background of a team member. The reality is that a team composed of members from different cultural backgrounds will experience fault lines that reduce performance. However, these problems disappear over time (Watson, Kumar, & Michaelsen, 1993). Once a team has matured, it develops its own culture—a team culture. When all members of a team share the team culture, personal cultural background does not matter. The team monoculture is what is important to understand. Do team members all think similarly about their relationship to the team and the organization? Organizations must consider team culture alongside the more “traditional” concept of culture as nationality, beliefs, and ethnicity. Further, this raises an important research question as to how and when an organization's approach to EOR might lead to the creation of a team monoculture.
All of these myths paint a bleak picture of teamwork in organizations. That should not be the take-away message of this chapter. After all, the entire reason this chapter can exist is that the field already knows these myths are, well, myths. The research base has already addressed much of what is necessary to work against these myths, which means that there are ways for organizations to properly train, support, and create teams and teamwork. But that is not all—organizations are not the only ones involved in this whole process, after all. Given the hierarchical nature of many organizations, leaders have their own set of responsibilities in making sure their teams are effective. Finally, teams must possess a set of general competencies and capabilities in order to succeed.
First, organizations need to consider how their promotion of teamwork, their teamwork policies, and their incentivizing of taskwork and teamwork influence teams. This chapter is, after all, about teams and the EOR—the organization is not only responsible for creating teams and training them, but also for supporting them and fostering their relationship with work teams. Promoting teamwork requires building a true culture of teamwork. An organization that espouses the virtues of teamwork but does nothing to ensure teamwork is actually part of the employee work paradigm cannot be surprised when its teams fail. A culture of teamwork encourages team-work not because it is an imposed requirement, but because it is viewed as the best way to get things done. Organizations that want to walk the walk need to incentivize teamwork appropriately. Whether these incentives are monetary or through status and recognition, effective teamwork should be encouraged through systems that actually work to promote teamwork. In the aforementioned StitchCo example, “local” teamwork was rewarded to the detriment of interteam teamwork. What can organizations learn from this? There are many ways to reward teams, and structures that seem intuitively effective may end up being counterproductive. In addition, just as there are many ways to reward teams, different teams have different requirements for organizational support.
Next, organizations need to implement effective team training efforts. Fostering teamwork, supporting teams, and incentivizing team performance is of rather diminished usefulness when the teams themselves do not know how to engage in teamwork. As we have noted throughout this chapter, training the individuals in a team on how to interact as a team is an indispensible part of an organization's efforts to have successful team operations. Just as the field has developed a wealth of knowledge on how teams function, so too has it developed a number of best practices for team training. Drawing on the prior successes (and failures) of other organizations, team training is a mature area of study. Today, we know that team training should be contextualized with the specific team-work competencies appropriate for a given task and context. We know that it is critical to focus on the actual teamwork behaviors, rather than the taskwork the teamwork is in support of, during such training. And we know that this focus on teamwork should not come at the expense of contextualizing the behaviors with in the taskwork framework. In addition to these specific teamwork training considerations, organizations seeking to train teams should refer to standard educational best practices. By providing feedback, extending opportunities for practice, evaluating multiple levels of learning outcomes, and providing different modes of learning, organizations can ensure their team training efforts are successful.
Whether organizations realize it or not, leaders are not just responsible for setting agendas. Their actions influence how teams operate; even on an implicit level, team members will learn how a leader behaves and alter their own behaviors accordingly. Given this tendency, it is in an organization's best interest to ensure these adaptations support effective teamwork.
Research shows that leadership and team processes are intertwined (Zaccaro & Klimoski, 2002). The functional perspective of leadership suggests a direct link between leadership and a team's actions. Under functional leadership, four main processes describe how leaders interface with their teams: information structuring, information use in problem solving, managing personnel, and managing resources. Leaders support their teams by matching member capabilities to appropriate roles, offering strategy, monitoring for changes in goals, providing feedback, developing shared mental models, and motivating them. Each of these behaviors carries its own considerations and best practices; teams that function in different contexts will respond differently to leaders. However, if there is one take-away point for leaders, it is that effective leadership of teams requires the presence of at least some of these behaviors. If all a leader is doing is setting the team's goals, the leader is not doing much in the way of leading.
Whether leaders are functionally a part of the team or engage in leadership from a more “removed” standpoint, they can influence and support teamwork (Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010). Indeed, certain behaviors are more effective for leaders “on the inside,” whereas others are better applied form the outside. Internally, leaders are well positioned to monitor, support, and work. Externally, leaders are better able to provide training, engage in sensemaking, and distribute resources. Similarly, the level of leadership formality may influence how these behaviors affect teams. Just as team context influences how teamwork functions, so too does leader context influence how leadership affects teamwork.
Finally, we would be remiss in not addressing the highly generalizable set of competencies that a team should possess. Throughout this chapter, we have noted the various forms of support an organization can provide teams. Perhaps the most meaningful way to support teams is to provide them with the basic building blocks of successful team interactions. By training team-generic, task-independent competencies, organizations can ensure that their teams have the general skills and competencies required of any successful team. These transportable skills and competencies can be used by teams of all types in all manner of teamwork tasks (Salas et al., 2000).
What are these general competencies? We have already mentioned some of them throughout this chapter. The first set of general competencies describes dispositions the individuals of a team hold. The very belief in the importance of teamwork is a key component of the effectiveness of a team's interactions. Without this belief, it is unlikely that teams will have the necessary “buy-in” to exhibit more complex team behaviors. Similarly, collective orientation describes the degree to which individuals in the team identify with the team. Individuals whose identity overlaps with the team's identity will be more motivated to ensure the team's success. A team's effectiveness is enhanced when it knows how to build morale and raise motivation for a particular task. Finally, the general level of assertiveness of a team's members will influence how that team interacts. A team with more assertive individuals will see a greater variety of ideas proposed and discussed, which is generally useful to a team's success. An echo chamber is not a good place for innovation!
Beyond these general knowledge and attitude competencies, there are skills and behaviors that are transportable across various team and task types. Given the importance of communication to teamwork, understanding how to exchange information properly is a natural contributor to overall team success. Similarly, knowing how to cooperate and consult with others is essential if team members are to meaningfully interact with each other. Once a team is interacting, conflict will arise sooner or later. Teams that are trained in some form of conflict resolution are not only inoculated against conflict's negative effects but may also be better prepared to benefit from the clash of ideas underlying the conflict.
At a bare minimum, teams should be armed with these transportable competencies. Morale building, conflict resolution, information exchange, task motivation, cooperation, consulting with others, assertiveness, collective orientation, and a belief in the importance of teamwork are applicable to the wide array of potential team and task contexts. Without access to these basic tools, teams are far less capable of tackling team tasks.
Although the term EOR suggests a relationship between a sole individual and an organization, the modern organizational reality is one defined by teams. Teams are how things function today. Unless the reality of work changes, understanding how teams fit into the EOR is critical to organizational success. Our intent with this chapter was to provide high-level information that organizations can use to combat the misconceptions that would otherwise prevent them from creating a positive team-focused EOR. The science of teams has provided a fantastic resource for organizations to take advantage of. Our knowledge of teams grows every day. As long as organizations expand their efforts to integrate this team knowledge, their team EORs will remain fruitful.
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