AARHUS UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Organisational Behaviour
Lecture 6: Groups and teams
Mette Strange ([email protected])
Department of Business Administration

TATION

AARHUS UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Agenda
Different types of groups
Stages of group and team development
Different roles in groups/teams
High performance and autonomous teams
Conflicts and competition in and between
groups/teams

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SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Groups and teams

Groups:
Schein: a group is any number of people
Who interact with one another
Who are psychologically aware of one another
Who perceive themselves to be a group

Teams:
Katzenbach: a team is a small number of people with
complementary skills who are committed to a common
purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they
hold themselves mutually accountable.
Self-directed
Self-managed teams
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Why gather in groups/teams?

Company dimension:

Human dimension:

Parker (1990): Use of teams leads to:

Greater productivity
More effective uses of resources
Better decisions
Better problem solving
Better quality products/services
Increased innovation and
creativity

Sense of belonging
We are social animals
Need input from and social
interaction with others
Most people belong to several
groups both in and out of work
Each providing different
benefits to their members
and satisfying various needs

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SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Organizational forms of groups, and

their functions
Formal groups:
Are established in a planned way either
permanently or temporarily. Their purpose
is to help solve specific problems derived
from the goals of the organization

Informal groups:
Are spontaneously created. They can be
aimed at problem-solving purposes, but
more often fulfill the group members
pychological needs

Function:
To solve complex tasks
To produce creative ideas
To coordinate across departments
To increase decision-making ability
To facilitate implementation
To ease socialization and training

Function:

To fulfill affiliation needs

To develop and maintain a common

identity

To establish and test social reality

To reduce fear and insecurity

To accomplish tasks

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SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

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SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Tabel 8.6: Common types of teams

Quality circles

Virtual teams

Self-managed
teams

Type

advice

Advice or project

Production, project
or action

Empowerment

consultation

Consultation,
participation or
delegation

Delegation

Members

Production/service
personnel

Managers and
technical specialists

Production/service,
technical specialists

Basis of membership

Voluntary

Assigned (voluntary)

Assigned

Relationship to
organisation structure

Parallel

Parallel or integrated

Integrated

Amount of face-toface communication

Face-to-face

Periodic to none

Varies
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Self-directed and self-managed

teams
Starting point: Swedish car manufacturing industry experimented with
autonomous work groups in 1970s
Each group decided for themselves how their work was to be distributed and
scheduled
Productivity increased, labor turnover dropped, product quality improved and
absenteeism fell
Organisations with self-directed teams differ in terms of:
Fewer layers of managers and supervisors
Reward systems are often skill or team based, rather than seniority based
Leaders may be elected by the team
The leader as a coach and facilitator
Employees learn all the jobs required of the team
Information is shared with the employees.

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Figur 8.5

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Self-directed teams: a gift to

organizations?
Typical pitfalls:
The difficulty of removing the system, once it is established and
experienced by the workers
Varying levels and degrees of resistance by elements in the
organisation
Increasing peer pressure and its consequences.

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Figur 8.3 Team effectiveness

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Building and maintaining effective

teams
No quick and easy way
The key to success does not always appear to lie in the
selection of team members (talented individuals can work
poorly as a team)
The size of a group as an important moderating factor in its
ability to be effective: between 5 and 8 members (Handy)
Effectiveness is a function of group members orientation and
attitude, not simply the behaviour of the leader.
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High performing teams

Necessary that the team is thinking we
instead of I, and that cooperation in the
group is characterized by:

Trust to the other members of the team

Loyalty to the decisions made
Initiative to carry out decisions
Responsibility work and cooperation
Reliability in all situations
Energy - everybody must contribute
Respect we are all different
Commitment - results
Evaluation improvement.

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Tuckman: Team Developoment

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Team Development (2)

Other steps?
De-norming ( members move in different directions as interests and expectations change)
De-storming (prioritizing comes to forefront again)
De-forming (members interest in group/tasks less than own interests)
Leadership style and group/team productivity:
A result-oriented leadership styles may be best in the early phases, but likely to have a
negative effect on cohesiveness and quality of work later on
An employee-oriented leadership style may be less desirable in early phases, but highly
compatible with the later phases of development

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Roles vs. relations

Roles: Focus on competences
Relations: Not focus on what you know, but
who you know and how well you know them
If a network consists of people who know
each other
More trust
More redundancy
Speak the same language, about the same things more
consensus
Less surprises and perhaps less innovation.

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Schein: roles gone bad

Role overload
When the expectations of others are far greater than the
employee can manage ( stress)
Role conflict
When there are many, often conflicting, expectations
Role ambiguity
When there is poor communication about expectations
(e.g. Unclear job description or performance management)

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Do-roles
Implementer
needed to plan a
practical, workable
strategy and carry it out
as efficiently as possible

Shaper
provided the necessary
drive to ensure that
the team kept moving
and did not lose focus
or momentum

Ressource investigator
provided inside knowledge on
the opposition and made sure
that the teams idea would
carry to the world outside the
team

Plant
The role was so-called because
one such individual was
planted in each team. They
tended to be highly creative
and good at solving problems
in unconventional ways
Monitor Evaluator
was needed to provide a
logical eye, make impartial
judgements where required
and to weigh up the teams
options in a dispassionate way

Think-roles

Completer-finisher
most effectively used at
the end of a task, to
polish and scrutinise
the work for errors,
subjecting it to the highest
standards of quality
control

Teamworker
helped the team to gel, using
their versatility to identify the
work required and complete it
on behalf of the team
Specialist
an individual
with in-depth
knowledge of a
key area

Co-ordinator
needed to focus on the
teams objectives, draw
out team members and
delegate work
appropriately

Social Roles
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Why teams dont work: Hackman

You might produce magic (but maybe not)

Teams need boundaries (and members need to know what
they are)
Teams must have a direction (and someone willing to
determine it)
Teamwork doesnt necessarily lead to satisfaction (but good
performance does)
Bigger is better
Diversity isnt always a plus
Teams need a devils advocate (even if they dont want one)
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Figur 8.4 Why teams fail

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SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Intra- and intergroup conflicts

Intra-group (in the group):

Inter-group (between groups):

Extreme personalities in the same

group/team
The members compete for (limited)
resources
For instance sales people, real
estate

Some competition between groups is

good
But right balance between friendly
competition and cooperation
between the groups is needed
Competition between groups in an
organisation leads to greater
Some members are free riders (social
motivation, but be aware of potential
loafing)
consequences

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Intra- and inter-group

consequences of competition
Intra-group consequences:

Inter-group consequences:

Increased loyalty within

group
Increased formalisation
Focus on the job/task (and
not social activities)
Acceptance of one taking the
control
Members must conform to
the group norms

Identification of enemies
We and them
Strong selective perception
and single loop-learning

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Inter-group competition: Loser and

winner reactions
Winner reactions:

Loser reactions:

Increased group solidarity

More focus on social aspects
(having a nice time)
Increased interest in the
individual member: situation
and problems
No focus on experiences/
single-loop learning

It is not our fault; question

the result
Who to blame?
The group seems to break up
Some groups try to work their
way out of the problems
Double-loop learning

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Reducing negative consequences of

inter-group competition
Finding common external enemies, e.g. competitor
on the market
Re-establish the contact between the competing
groups and encourage negotiations about common
concerns
Launch new joint goals that call for cooperation
between the groups, e.g. develop a new
product/service
Initiate various kinds of organization-developing
activities and training, e.g. confrontation meetings,
rotation systems, inter-group sessions.

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Reducing/preventing inter-group
conflict
Inter-group competition and conflict will often
be directly related to a companys
organizational structure

Establish an evaluating system that offers rewards in

proportion to the results of the entire organization
Use problem-solving and decision-making procedures that
increase the contact and communication between the various
groups
Introduce rotation systems and similar organizational activities
Reduce the basis for loser/winner situations, e.g. avoid
competition for common scarce resources/career
opportunities.
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The Asch effect

Based on laboratory experiments Soloman Asch
revealed a negative side of group dynamics
Perception test: seven to nine college students
look at 12 pairs of cards to identify the line that was
the same length as the standard line
Surprising results

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Groupthink
Even in a strongly cohesive group, pressure
is placed on members to fall into line and
conform to the group norms
Groupthink: a mode of thinking in which
people engage when they are deeply involved
in a cohesive group, in which strivings for
unanimity override motivations to realistically
appraise alternative courses of action
(Brooks, p. 136).

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Figur 7.5: Symptoms & Consequences of

Groupthink

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Next lecture
Culture

Sinding, chapter 12: Organisational and

international culture (main focus: organisational
culture)

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