The Model of Team Effectiveness

Team Effectiveness

The Model of Team Effectiveness

Source: Organizational behavior: Team Effectiveness Model (McShane and VonGlinow ,2007)

The McShane and VonGlinow (2007) model is following the systems triptych “Input-Process-Output”. Input is Organizational and team environment. Processes are the team design and team processes.  The Output is the team effectiveness (McShane & VonGlinow, 2007).

Input

The Organizational and team environment have five elements. These five elements are Reward, Communication, Organizational structure, Organizational leadership and Physical space. Reward is giving the team member or employee a bonus or anything to motivate the team member to perform well. In Communication, the leader or team members must listen and share to each other and free to express their personal feeling and it have to be true, honest, open and regular (Pramlal, 2004). Organizational structure is organized around the work process to make team effectiveness. It can increase the interaction among the team members to make a good relationship with each other in the team and reduce the interaction with the people outside the team to avoid the bad influence to the team. Organizational leadership is based on the leader of the team. Leader must make a good decision, execute the plan and provide fully support and direction while the members focus on the operational efficiency and flexibility to increase the performance of the team. Leader also works together with members towards the goal (Essens, Vogelaar, Mylle, Blendell, Paris, Halpin & Baranski, 2005). Physical space can improve the team performance by making it easier for the team member to observe and assist each other. The physical space can put all members together in a large space room. These members brought the sources into the room to resolve the issues together and improve collaboration across functions.

Processes

Team design includes parameters than influence team performance such as task characteristics, team size and team composition.

Size of a team will influence the performance of the team. The small teams are believed to perform better than large because of efficient coordination of the team. A small team will have a good communication and the members` different viewpoints are less likely to cause differentiation. In the large teams, members will show less attention to others’ needs and they will not very satisfy the group memberships. The large team lack of togetherness and motivation and will decrease productivity of the team. The team size should be kept under a certain limits, usually between 2 to12 people (Demirors, Sarmagik, Demirors, 1997).

In the team composition, the effective team members must be able and willing to work on the team. The ability of the leader to handle the issue and familiarity with the issue will affect the team composition (Mello, Ruckes, 2006). There have the team competencies in the team composition and have five Cs in the team competencies. These are Cooperating, Coordinating, Communicating, Comforting and Conflict resolving. Cooperating includes sharing the resources and be sufficiently adaptive for other team members to fulfill the needs and preferences. Coordination builds the organization of the team’s tasks and the distribution of the necessary resources to the team members to fulfill these tasks (Sartzetaki, 2011). Communicating is the team members must transmit information freely, efficiently and respectfully. It will effectively curtail the team leader’s power, if be improved (Mello, Ruckes, 2006). Comforting is the team members must help other members such as co-workers to maintain a healthy psychological, make them comfortable. Conflict resolving is the team members must have the skills and motivation to solve and avoid the conflict among the team members.

 Team processes is including some elements such as team development, team norms, team cohesiveness and team trust. In Team process, we will focus on the Team development and Team trust.  

Team development has four stages (Frances, 2008). The first stage is Individual Anticipation. This is described as testing boundaries of behavior. Group members maybe quiet and watchful and like to depend on the group leader when doing the tasks. Second stage is Individual Experimentation. This is about the conflict and polarization which is around the individual issue. Third stage is Collective Construction. At this stage, team members must share the norms, develop the value of team and establish the cohesiveness. The team members must agree what they are doing and understanding and they proceed to feel the group is having a purpose and meaningful. Last stage is Collaborative Action. At this stage, the members will aligned with their own sense and have commonality in construing the role and responsibility of each member. They will perform well on the task and make the team valuable.

Team Trust is referring the positive expectation from one person to another person in situation involving risk. People trust another people when they share similarities, communicate regularly and have a same common cultural context (Pramlal. 2004). There have three types of trust. The first type and also lowest potential level type is calculus-based trust. This is based on the deterrence. This kind of trust is easily to be broken by violation of expectation. The second type and also medium potential level type is knowledge-based trust. This trust is based on the predictability and competence. This trust also relates to confidence in the other person`s ability. This type of trust is more stable than calculus-based trust because it develops over time. The last type and the highest potential level type is Identification-based trust. This is based on the common mental models and values. This is occurring when team members think, feel and act like each other. This trust is the strongest and most robust. It increases with person`s social identity with team.  

Output

The Output in the team effectiveness model is team effectiveness. Team effectiveness has three major components. These are task performance, job satisfaction and maintain team survival (Bushe & Coetzer, 2007; Sivasubramaniam, Murry, Avolio and Jung, 2002). In this part, we will focus on the task performance and job satisfaction.

In the task performance, the team members must perform very well to accomplish the task to be an effective team. The team must have the good Task skill which is effort necessary to get the job done (Londino, 2002). The high task performance must have the high quality and productivity, Continuous Improvement and Decreased Cost and Effective Use of Time (Sartzetaki, 2011).  High quality and productivity is the team must provide the members assistance and fully support. The team must provide the full resources and ideas to the team members. The combination of resources and ideas facilitates the team to produce a high quality and valuable outcomes to satisfy its stakeholders. The true productivity increases when team members are capable of solving the real problems of the business. In continuous improvement, team members can use feedback system to improve their performance and are committed to excellence. In the good communication structure, members can participate and utilize the feedback to improvement their performance and the team. To perform well in task, the team members must learn how to effectively use the time to done the job with low cost. These costs are stated as process losses and refer to resources that are expended during team development and maintenance. The expense of time and energy in the process will influence the accomplishment of the team’s task.

To be an effective team, the team must make every team members very satisfy the job. The team must fulfill the needs and the goals of the team members. To let members satisfying in the job, the team must let the member choose to work with on similar task in the future and let them satisfy the outcome of the team (Bushe & Coetzer,2007). Job satisfaction is combined psychological, physiological and environmental circumstances that cause the member satisfactions. (Ramayah, Jantan, Tadisina,2001). To let team members satisfy the job, team must satisfy the members need, it will be job satisfaction. There have four components to make the job satisfaction (Griffin, Patterson, West, 2001). These four are related with each other. The first is Job enrichment. This is including the increasing the responsibilities of employee, the variety of tasks performed and the flexibility to implement tasks. The second is extent of teamwork. In this part, team members should have equal opportunity to participate the team decision making and share knowledge and information with each other to enhance the outcome of the team members (Pramlal, 2004). It will also decrease the degree to which supervisor can be supportive. The third is job autonomy. It is more related with job enrichment on team outcomes. The employee job enrichment which is increased skill flexibility, responsibility and work variety will explain the job autonomy. If the members have the autonomy, they will feel satisfaction and perform well on the job. The last is supervisory support. This is more related with extent of teamwork. Supervisory support displayed a strong relationship with job satisfaction. The supervisor must fully support the team member and fulfill the need of members. These four components will be job satisfaction with a good control measures such as firm size and productivity. With the high job satisfaction, the members will satisfy the job and perform well in the team and make an effective team.

Written by Teoh Zi Chyn, Lee Cheng Ke, Yeoh Teong Seng, Loh Kok Wah, Goh Hua Kent, Tan Yean How ( Students of Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman)

Reference:

McShane, S. L. & VonGlinow, M. A. (2007). Organizational Behavior. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Bushe G.R, & Coetzer G.H. (2007). Group Development and Team Effectiveness: Using  Cognitive Representations to Measure Group Development and Predict Task     Performance and Group Viability. THE JOURNAL OF APPLIED       BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE, 200-201.

Sivasubramaniam N, Murry W.D, Avolio B.J and Jung D.I (2002).  A Longitudinal Model of the Effects of Team Leadership and Group Potency on Group Performance, Group & Organization Management, 70.

Londino, F. 2002 (June). Developing High-Performing Teams. Lightwave, 19(6), 109.

Sartzetaki. V (2011). Determinants of Effective Teams: A model for Resource Teams in  the Hellenic Navy. MBA PROFESSIONAL REPORT. pg34-35

Pramlal. A (2004) .The influence of Team Cohesiveness on Team Effectiveness, 19.

Henderson, S., & Walkinshaw, O. (2002). Command team assessment: Principles,                          guidance and observations.’ Unpublished report. QinetiQ, Fort Halstead.

T. Ramayah, Muhamad Jantan, Suresh K. Tadisina(2001). JOB SATISFACTION: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR ALTERNATIVES TO JDI, Global Issues. 

Griffin M.A, Patterson M.G, West M.A (2001) Job satisfaction and teamwork: the role of                        supervisor support, Journal of Organizational Behavior.pg 541-542.

Frances. M (2008) STAGES OF GROUP DEVELOPMENT – A PCP APPROACH,                   Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 5.

Demirors. E, Sarmagik. G, Demirors. O (1997) The Role of Teamwork in Software Development : Microsoft Case Study.

Mello A.S, Ruckes M.E (2006). Team Composition,The Journal of  Business, Vol. 79,  No. 3 (May 2006), pp. 1019-1039

Essens, P. J. M., Vogelaar, A. L. W., Mylle, J. J. C., Blendell, C., Paris, C., Halpin, S. M. & Baranski, J. V. (2005). Military Command Team Effectiveness: Model and Instrument for Assessment and Improvement. NATO RTO technical report.