Get into your Teams
• If you do not have a team, please come see me. Food for Thought
• Brainstorming in groups
• 12 items belong to a general category
• Your task is to come up with as many criteria as you can to classify them into subcategories.
Example
•
•
•
•
•
•
Taurus
Cavalier
Saturn
Pathfinder
Neon
Park Avenue
Debriefing
• Who followed the guidelines?
– How did it go?
– Any problems/complications that arose?
– Observations?
– Did all group members participate equally?
Team Value
• Process gain is getting more from the team than you would expect according to the capabilities of its individual members.
• Process loss is getting less from the team than you would expect based on the capabilities of its individual members.
What influences Team Work and
Processes?
Five Aspects of Team Composition
Team Composition
• Role is defined as the behaviors a person is expected to display in a given context.
– Leader–staff teams - the leader makes decisions for the team and provides direction and control over members who perform assigned tasks.
– Team task roles refer to behaviors that directly facilitate the accomplishment of team tasks.
– Team building roles refer to behaviors that influence the quality of the team’s social climate.
– Individualistic roles reflect behaviors that benefit the individual at the expense of the team.
Team Composition, Cont’d
• Member ability – team members provide a wide array of abilities, both physical and cognitive.
– Disjunctive tasks are tasks with an objectively verifiable best solution, and the member who has the highest level of the ability will have the most influence on the effectiveness of the team.
– Conjunctive tasks are tasks where the team’s performance depends on the abilities of the “weakest link.”
– Additive tasks are tasks for which the contributions resulting from the abilities of every member “add up” to determine team performance.
Team Composition, Cont’d
Member personality - team members possess a wide variety of personality traits.
Agreeable people tend to be more cooperative and trusting, tendencies that promote positive attitudes about the team and smooth interpersonal interactions. Conscientious people tend to be dependable and work hard to achieve goals.
Extraverted people tend to perform more effectively in interpersonal contexts and are more positive and optimistic in general.
Team Composition, Cont’d
• Team diversity is the degree to which members are different from one another in terms of any attribute that might be used as a basis of categorizing people.
– Value in diversity problem-solving approach says diversity is beneficial because it provides for a larger pool of knowledge and perspectives from which a team can draw as it carries out its work. – Similarity-attraction approach says people tend to be more attracted to others who are perceived as more similar.
– Surface-level diversity refers to diversity regarding observable attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex, and age.
– Deep-level diversity refers to diversity with respect to attributes that are less easy to observe initially, but that can be inferred after more direct experience.
Team Composition, Cont’d
• Team Size
– Having a greater number of members is beneficial for management and project teams but not for
teams
