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Summary Work- & Organizational Psychology Part 2
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This is an elaborated summary of the last 8 chapters of the book Organizational Behavior by McGrawhill, McShane and Von Glinow.
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Organizational Behavior: Emerging Knowledge, Global Reality CHAPTER 1 summary
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Chapter 9 - Communicating in Teams and Organizations
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Chapter 10 - Power and Influence in the Workplace
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Chapter 8Team dynamics
Teams and informal groups
Teams: Groups of two or more people that exist to fulfil a purpose
interdependently and are mutually accountable for achieving common goals →
perceive themselves as a social entity.
Informal groups: Groups with little or no interdependence or organizationally focused
objective.
● Informal groups and organizational outcomes: Informal groups minimize
employee stress → group members provide emotional and informational
social support.
Advantages and disadvantages of teams
Advantages:
● Breadth of knowledge and expertise.
● Diversity of perspectives.
● Acceptance of solution.
● Make better decisions, products and services.
● Better information sharing.
● Higher employee motivation and engagement.
○ Fulfills drive to bond.
○ Team members are benchmarks for comparison.
Disadvantage: Process losses → cost of developing and maintaining teams.
The challenges of teams:
● Process losses: Resources expended on team development and maintenance
rather than on performing the task.
● Brooks’ law: Adding people to a late software project only makes it later.
● Social loafing: Ringelmann Effect (1913): Group performance is better than
individual performance, but performance per person decreased and this loss
increases even more as the group increases.
○ Form smaller teams: Reduces social loafing because each person’s
performance becomes more noticeable and important for the team.
○ Specialize tasks: Individual effort easier to observe when each member
performs a different work activity.
○ Measure individual performance: Social loafing minimized when each
member’s contribution is measured.
○ Increase job enrichment: Social loafing minimized when tasks have high
motivation potential.
○ Select motivated, team-oriented employees: Minimizing it by carefully
selecting team members who will form a bond or identity with the team.
■ High conscientiousness and agreeableness + collectivist value
orientation.
Model of team effectiveness
A team is effective when it benefits the organization and its members and survives long
enough to accomplish its mandate.
, ● Effectiveness partly measured by the achievement of that objective.
● Effectiveness relies on the satisfaction and well-being of its members.
● Effectiveness includes the team’s ability to survive long enough to fulfil its purpose.
Organizational and team environment: People tend to work together more effectively…
● … when they receive some team-based rewards.
● … when information systems support team coordination.
● … when organization’s structure assigns discrete clusters of work activity to teams.
● … when leadership supports teamwork over “star” individuals and team diversity.
● … when physical layout of the workspace encourages frequent communication.
Team design elements
Task characteristics: Task complexity demands
teamwork, but teams work better when the work is well
structured rather than ambiguous or novel.
Task interdependence: Extent to which team
members must share materials, information or
expertise in order to perform their jobs.
Team size: Teams should be large enough to provide
the necessary abilities and viewpoints to perform the
work, yet small enough to maintain efficient
coordination and meaningful involvement of each
member.
Team composition: →
Advantages team diversity:
● Tend to see problems differently.
● Broader pool of technical abilities.
● Better representation of everyone.
Disadvantages of team diversity:
● Takes longer to become a high-performing team.
● Faultlines splitting team into subgroups undermine
effectiveness.
Team processes
Team development:
○ Forming: Test boundaries of behavior, evaluate
value of membership, discover expectations, Defer to existing authority.
○ Storming: Interpersonal conflict, compete for team roles, Influence goals and
means and Establish norms.
, ○ Norming: Form team mental models, agree on team objectives, develop
cohesion and Establish roles.
○ Performing: Task oriented, committed, Efficient coordination, Conflicts
resolved quickly and High cooperation and trust.
○ Adjourning: When the team is about to disband → focus shifts form
task orientation to relationship focus.
● Developing team identities and mental models:
○ Identities: Team development occurs when employees make the team part
of their social identity and take ownership of the team’s success.
○ Mental models: Development of knowledge structures mutually held by team
members about expectations and ideals of and team dynamics.
● Team roles: Some roles help the team achieve its goals, other roles maintain
relationships within the team.
● Accelerating team development through team building: Process that consists of
formal activities intended to improve development and functioning of a work team.
○ Goal setting: Clarify goals, increase team’s motivation to accomplish these
goals, establish feedback mechanisms of team performance.
○ Problem solving: Decision making, including how the team identifies
problems and searches for alternatives.
○ Role clarification: Clarifies and reconstructs each member’s perceptions of
her or his role as well as the role expectations of other team members.
○ Interpersonal relations: Helps members learn more about each other, build
trust in each other, manage conflict, strengthens social identity with group.
Team norms:
● How team norms develop: Norms develop during team formation because people
need to anticipate or predict how others will act. Norms also form when discovering
behavior that helps function more effectively.
● Preventing dysfunctional team norms: Clearly stating them when team is created
or selecting people with appropriate values.
● Changing dysfunctional team norms: Speaking up or actively coaching the team,
introducing rewards that counter dysfunctional norms, and when norms deeply
ingrained it may be necessary to form a new team with more favorable norms.
Team cohesion: Degree of attraction people feel toward the team and their motivation to
remain members.
● Influences on team cohesion:
○ Member similarity: We are attracted more to coworkers who are similar to
us.
○ Team size: Smaller teams tend to have more cohesion than larger teams.
■ Easier to agree on goals.
■ More influence → greater sense of involvement.
○ Member interaction: More cohesion when members interact fairly regularly.
○ Somewhat difficult entry: More cohesion when
entry to the team is restricted.
○ Team success: More cohesion when more
successful → attracted to groups that fulfil
needs and goals.
○ External competition and challenges: More
cohesion when facing external competition or
challenging objective.
● Consequences of team cohesion: →
, Team trust:
○ Calculus-based trust: Logical calculation that other team members will act
appropriately because they face sanctions if they violate expectations.
○ Knowledge-based trust:
Predictability of another team
member’s behavior.
○ Identification-based trust: Mutual
understanding and an emotional
bond among team members.
● Dynamics of team trust: Employees
typically join a team with a moderate
or high level of trust in their new
coworkers → people usually believe
fellow team members are reasonably
competent → knowledge-based trust → developing degree social identity
with the group → identification-based trust.
Self-directed teams
Cross-functional work groups that are organized around work processes, complete an entire
piece of work requiring several interdependent tasks and have substantial autonomy over
the execution of those tasks.
Success factors for self-directed teams:
● Should be responsible for entire work process → independence from
another team.
● Autonomy allows to respond quickly and effectively to client and stakeholder
demands and motivates team members.
● More successful when work site and technology support coordination and
communication among team members.
Virtual teams
Teams whose members operate across space, time and organizational boundaries and are
linked through information technologies to achieve organizational tasks.
Difference virtual teams:
● Members are not usually co-located.
● Due to lack of co-location, members of virtual teams depend primarily on information
technologies rather than face-to-face interaction to communicate and coordinate.
Success factors for virtual teams:
● Virtual team members need to apply the effective team behaviors described earlier.
● Virtual teams should have a toolkit of communication channels as well as freedom to
choose the channels that work best for them.
● Virtual teams need plenty of structure → clear operational objectives,
documented work processes and agreed-on roles and responsibilities.
● Virtual team members should meet face-to-face early in the team development
process.
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