Chapter 12- Teams: Processes and Communication

Most brainstorming sessions center around the following rules:

1. Express all ideas that come to mind (no matter how strange). 2. Go for quantity of ideas rather than quality. 3. Don't criticize or evaluate the ideas of others. 4. Build on the ideas of others.

Boundary spanning involves three types of activities

Ambassador activities, task coordinator activities, scout activities

Process loss is

a common and costly by-product of doing work in teams

Nominal group technique

a decision-making method that begins and ends by having group members quietly write down and evaluate ideas to be shared with the group; an offshoot of brainstorming that addresses some of its limitations

Creative behavior

activities are focused on generating novel and useful ideas and solutions

Cohesion

an emotional attachment that develops within a team that tends to foster high levels of motivation and commitment to the team performance

Noise

anything that interferes with, distorts, or slows down the transmission of information

Ambassador activties

communications that are intended to protect the team; members typically communicate with people who are higher up in the organization

Three types of taskwork processes

creative behavior, decision making, boundary spanning

Three factors that account for a team's ability to make accurate and effective decisions

decision informity, staff validity, hierarchical sensitivity

Decision making

decisions result from the interaction among team members

Task conflict

disagreements among members about the team's task

Relationship conflict

disagreements among team members in terms of interpersonal relationships or incompatibilities with respect to personal values or preferences

Messages that are transmitted through __ have the highest level of information richness

face-to-face channel

Process loss

getting less from the team than you would expect based on the capabilities of its individual members

Process gain

getting more from the team than you would expect according to the capabilities of its individual members

Transactive memory

how specialized knowledge is distributed among members in a manner that results in an effective system of memory for the team

Action processes

important as the taskwork is being accomplished

Interpersonal processes

important before, during, or in between periods of taskwork

Teamwork processes

interpersonal activities that facilitate the accomplishment of the team's work but do not directly involve task accomplishment itself

Task coordinator activities

involve communications that are intended to coordinate task-related issues with people or groups in other functional areas

Process gain is important because

it results in useful resources and capabilities that did not exist before the team created them

Boundary spanning

links to and coordinates the organization with key elements in the external environment

Positional Rotation (Cross Training)

members actually do the work of other team members

Personal Clarification (Cross Training)

members simply receive information regarding the roles of the other team members

Transition processes examples

mission analysis involves an analysis of the team's task, the challenges that face the team, and the resources available for completing the team's work. Strategy formulation refers to the development of courses of action and contingency plans, and then adapting those plans in light of changes that occur in the team's environment. goal specification involves the development and prioritization of goals related to the team's mission and strategy.

Teamwork processes and team performance

moderate positive effect

Action processes examples

monitoring progress toward goals. Teams that pay attention to goal-related information—perhaps by charting the team's performance relative to team goals—are typically in a good position to realize when they are "off-track" and need to make changes. Systems monitoring involves keeping track of things that the team needs to accomplish its work. A team that does not engage in systems monitoring may fail because it runs out of inventory, time, or other necessary resources. Helping behavior involves members going out of their way to help or back up other team members. Team members can provide indirect help to their teammates in the form of feedback or coaching, as well as direct help in the form of assistance with members' tasks and responsibilities Coordination refers to synchronizing team members' activities in a way that makes them mesh effectively and seamlessly. Poor coordination results in team members constantly having to wait on others for information or other resources necessary to do their part of the team's work.

Interpersonal processes examples

motivating and confidence building, which refers to things team members do or say that affect the degree to which members are motivated to work hard on the team's task. Expressions that create a sense of urgency and optimism are examples of communications that would fit in this category. ffect management involves activities that foster a sense of emotional balance and unity. If you've ever worked in a team in which members got short-tempered when facing pressure or blamed one another when there were problems, you have firsthand experience with poor affect management. conflict management, which involves the activities that the team uses to manage conflicts that arise in the course of its work. Conflict tends to have a negative impact on a team, but the nature of this effect depends on the focus of the conflict as well as the manner in which the conflict is managed.

Team process training

occurs in the context of a team experience that facilitates the team being able to function and perform more effectively as an intact unit

Production blocking

occurs when members have to wait on one another before they can do their part of the team task, often drives coordination losses

Brainstorming

perhaps the best-known activity that teams use to foster creative behavior; involves a face-to-face meeting of team members in which each offers as many ideas as possible about some focal problem or issue

Coordination loss

process loss due to the time and energy it takes to coordinate work activities with other team members

Scout activities

refer to things team members do to obtain information about technology, competitors, or the broader marketplace

Staff validity

refers to the degree to which members make good recommendations to the leader

Team Process

refers to the different types of communication, activities, and interactions that occur within teams that contribute to their ultimate end goals

Hierarchical sensitivity

reflects the degree to which the leader effectively weighs the recommendations of the members

Decision informity

reflects whether members possess adequate information about their own task responsibilities

Potency

second team state; the degree to which members believe that the team can be effective across a variety of situations and tasks

The communication process

sender, encoding the message, message channel, decoding the message, receiver

Team states

specific types of feelings and thoughts that coalesce in the minds of team members as a consequence of their experience working together

Teamwork processes and team commitment

strong positive effect

Process gain is synonymous with

synergy

Cross-training

team members can develop shared mental models of what's involved in each of the roles in the team and how the roles fit together to form a system

Positional Modeling (Cross Training)

team members observe how others do their jobs

Action learning

team process training in which a team is given a real problem that's relevant to the organization and then held accountable for analyzing the problem, developing an action plan, and finally carrying out the action plan.

Team characteristics, like member diversity, task interdependence, team size, and so forth affect

team processes and communication

transportable teamwork competencies

team training that involves helping people develop general teamwork competencies that they can transport from one team context to another

Transition processes

teamwork activities that focus on preparation for future work

Taskwork processes

the activities of team members that relate directly to the accomplishment of team tasks

Information richness

the amount and depth of information that gets transmitted in a message

Communication network patterns can be described in terms of centralization

the degree to which the communication in a network flows through some members rather than others

Groupthink

the drive toward conformity at the expense of other team priorities

Mental models

the level of common understanding among team members with regard to important aspects of the team and its task

Motivation loss

the loss in team productivity that occurs when team members don't work as hard as they could

Network structure

the pattern of communication that occurs regularly among each member of the team

Communications

the process by which information is exchanged and understood by two or more people, usually with the intent to motivate or influence behavior

The communication process may suffer it the participants lack communication competence

the skills involved in encoding, transmitting, and receiving messages

Social loafing

the tendency for people to put less effort into a simple task when working with others on that task

Team building

training normally conducted by a consultant and intended to facilitate the development of team processes related to goal setting, interpersonal relations, problem solving, and role clarification