Groups, Teams, and Their Leadership

2. 10 Groups, Teams, and Their Leadership Chapter • “We are born for cooperation, as are the feet, the hands, the eyelids, and the upper and lower jaws.” • ~Marcus Aurelius

3. Introduction • Groups and teams are different than solely the skills, abilities, values, and motives of those who comprise them. • Groups are essential if leaders are to impact anything beyond their own behavior. • Group perspective looks at how different group characteristics can affect relationships both with the leader and among the followers.

4. Individuals Versus Groups Versus Teams • Team members usually have a stronger sense of identification among themselves than group members do. • Teams have common goals or tasks. • Task independence typically is greater with teams than with groups. • Team members often have more differentiated and specialized roles than group members. • Teams can be considered as highly specialized groups.

5. The Nature of Groups • Group: Two or more persons interacting with one another in a manner that each person influences and is influenced by each other person. • This definition incorporates the concept of reciprocal influence between leaders and followers. • Group members interact and influence each other. • The definition does not constrain individuals to only one group.

6. Group Size • Leader emergence is partly a function of group size. • As groups become larger, cliques are more likely to develop. • Group size can affect a leader’s behavioral style. • Span of control • Group size affects group effectiveness.

7. Group Size (continued) • Additive task: A task where the group’s output simply involves the combination of individual outputs. • Process losses: Inefficiencies created by more and more people working together. • Social loafing: Phenomenon of reduced effort by people when they are not individually accountable for their work. • Social facilitation: People increasing their level of work due to the presence of others.

8. Developmental Stages of Groups • Stages of groups development: • Forming • Storming • Norming • Performing • These stages are important because: • People are in many more leaderless groups than they may realize. • The potential relationships between leadership behaviors and group cohesiveness and productivity. • Punctuated equilibrium: Related to project teams.

9. Group Roles • Group roles: Sets of expected behaviors associated with particular jobs or positions. • Task role • Relationship role • Types of role problems: • Dysfunctional roles • Role conflict • Intrasender role conflict • Intersender role conflict • Interrole conflict • Person-role conflict • Role ambiguity

10. Group Norms • Norms: Informal rules groups adopt to regulate and regularize group members’ behavior. • Norms are more likely to be seen as important and apt to be enforced if they: • Facilitate group survival. • Simplify, or make more predictable, what behavior is expected of group members. • Help the group to avoid embarrassing interpersonal problems. • Express the central values of the group and clarify what is distinctive about the group’s identity.

11. Group Cohesion • Group cohesion: The glue that keeps a group together. • Highly cohesive groups interact with and influence each other more than do less cohesive groups. • Greater cohesiveness does not always lead to higher performance. • Highly cohesive groups may have lower absenteeism and lower turnover. • Highly cohesive groups may sometimes develop goals contrary to the larger organization’s goals.

12. Group Cohesion (continued) • Overbounding: Tendency of highly cohesive groups to erect what amount to fences or boundaries between themselves and others. • Groupthink: People in highly cohesive groups often become more concerned with striving for unanimity than in objectively appraising different courses of action. • Ollieism: When illegal actions are taken by overly zealous and loyal subordinates who believe that what they are doing will please their leaders.

13. Effective Team Characteristics and Team Building • Key characteristics for effective team performance: • Effective teams have a clear mission and high performance standards. • Leaders of effective teams spend a considerable amount of time assessing the technical skills of the team members. • Good leaders work to secure resources and equipment necessary for team effectiveness. • Effective leaders spend considerable time planning and organizing in order to make optimal use of available resources. • High levels of communication helped minimize interpersonal conflicts.

14. Effective Team Characteristics and Team Building (continued) • Four variables that need to be in place for a team to work effectively: • Task structure • Group boundaries • Norms • Authority

15. Organizational Shells

16. Ginnett’s Team Effectiveness Leadership Model • Stages of the Team Effectiveness Leadership Model (TLM): • Input • Process • Process measures • Group dynamics • Output • This model is a mechanism to: • Identify what a team needs to be effective, • Point the leader either toward roadblocks or toward ways to make the team even more effective than it already is.

17. Systems Theory Applied to Teams

18. Basic TLM Outputs: Outcomes of High Performance Teams

19. TLM Diagnosis Process: Diagnose Using the Process Variables

20. Leadership Prescriptions of the Model • A team should be built like a house or automobile: • Start with a concept • Create a design • Engineer it to do what you want it to do • Manufacture it to meet those specifications • The three critical functions for team leadership: • Dream • Design • Development

21. Three Functions of Leadership

22. Diagnosis and Leverage Points • Process block of the TLM: • Individual factors • Organizational level • Team design • Concluding thoughts about Ginnett’s Team Effectiveness Leadership model: • Leaders can influence team effectiveness by: • Ensuring the team has a clear sense of purpose and performance expectations. • Designing or redesigning input stage variables at the individual, organizational, and team design levels. • Improving team performance through ongoing coaching.

23. Team Leadership Model, Robert C. Ginnett, Ph.D.: The Four Faces of the “Engine” of the Team Leadership Model

24. Factors from the Normative Model of Group Effectiveness and the Interactional Framework

25. Virtual Teams (Geographically Dispersed Teams – GDTs) • Five major areas that need to change for global teams to work: • Senior management leadership • Innovative use of communication technology • Adoption of an organization design that enhances global operations • The ability to capture the strengths of diverse cultures, languages, and people.

26. Virtual Teams (Geographically Dispersed Teams – GDTs) • Conclusions that leaders of virtual teams need to bear in mind: • Distance between members is multidimensional. • Impact of such distances on performance is not directly proportional to objective measures of distance. • Differences in the effects that distance seems to have is due at least partially to two intervening variables: • Integrating practices within a virtual team, • Integrating practices between a virtual team and its larger host organization.

27. Summary • Group perspective: Showed that followers’ behaviors can be the result of factors somewhat independent of their individual characteristics. • Leaders should use a team perspective for understanding follower behavior and group performance. • Team Leadership Model: Team effectiveness can be best understood in terms of inputs, processes, and outcomes. • By identifying certain process problems in teams, leaders can use the model to diagnose appropriate leverage points for action.