Good teams, Bad teams: What’s the difference?

The team seems to be the default work structure in organizations. Indeed it’s widely believed that teams are more effective than non-team structures whatever the job to be performed. It’s equally widely believed that gathering a bunch of people and giving them a common objective make them a team. And finally, it’s commonly believed that removing formal leadership will result in a team to self-organize. These simplistic viewpoints prevent organizations from using teamwork appropriately.

In this article we’ll try to answer three questions:

• What distinguishes teams from individuals and groups?
• What kind of work are teams good at?
• What are the characteristics of effective teams?

Understanding the difference between group and team

Before going further, it’s critical to understand what distinguishes teams from groups.

A group is a collection of people with a commonality. Groups are either formal or informal. Formal groups are defined by the organization. A department or a project “team” are formal groups. Informal groups are made of people who spontaneously get together, for example based on their interests or out of friendship.

A team is a group whose individual efforts result in a performance that is greater than the sum of the individual inputs.

In this new light I bet that most of the “teams” you see around you are actually groups. You may think it’s only a question of terminology but it’s much more than that. Choosing whether a given activity will be performed by a single individual, a group of individuals, or a team greatly influences behavior, effectiveness, and even job satisfaction.

To be or not to be a team

As stated earlier, not every type of work is better handled by a team than by individuals.Obviously the benefits of using teams should exceed the costs. Running teams increases communication demands and coordination overhead. It also results in more conflicts to be managed as individuals’ work become interdependent (note that these conflicts may have positive outcomes).

Jobs teams are good at tend to meet the following three conditions:

• It can be done better by more than one person
• It creates a common purpose that is stronger than the aggregate of individual goals
• Group members’ tasks are interdependent: the success of the whole depends on the success of each task and the success of each task depends on the success of others

Interestingly, the attractiveness of teams depends on the breadth and depth of skills of people available. The more experienced people are, the less you’ll want to rely on teams because there’s a higher chance that a single person can perform the job better, faster. Again, I bet that you can see around you a number of activities that are currently assigned to teams and that could be better performed by (the right) individuals.

What makes a team effective?

Even if a team is the right structure to perform a given job, it doesn’t mean that the team will magically be better at it than an individual or a group of people managed the traditional way. Effective teams share several characteristics.

Leadership and structure
Effective teams have leaders, people who are responsible for keeping the team on-target and foster a favorable team environment. Additionally, team members must have the abilities, knowledge and skills to perform the job, articulated (formally or not) in terms of roles. Note that the structure of effective teams does not usually rely on job definitions or formal functions. Whereas job definitions attempt at defining the “how”, roles state the “what” and leave individuals freedom to choose how to achieve the desired outcome.

Size
It has been demonstrated that the most effective teams have 7 to 9 people. Of course this depends on the context. In doubt, use the smallest number of people that can complete the task.

Composition
It’s a poor people management practice to assign people on a team solely based on their availability and skills, which is unfortunately the case in most organizations today.

Managers have to realize than not everyone is a team player. First, taking part in a team should be voluntary. Second, studies show that some personality traits greatly facilitate teamwork. Teams perform better with individuals who are extrovert, agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable. And finally, it’s interesting to note that teams consisting in diverse individuals in terms of skills, age, gender, and personality tend to perform better.

Climate of trust
In effective teams, team members trust each others. To understand what it means, we have to look at the definition of trust:

Trust is a positive expectation that another will not act opportunistically. “Positive expectation” assumes familiarity about the other party. Consequently, trust is a history-dependent process based on limited but relevant samples of experience. “Opportunistically” refers to the inherent risk and vulnerability in any trusting relationship.
- Stephen P. Robbins, in “Organizational Behavior”

Besides trust within the team, there must also be trust between the team and their manager (project manager or functional manager for example), which enables the manager to let the team do their job with relative freedom (avoid micromanagement) and the team to trust that the manager will stand for them when interacting with other stakeholders.

Since it takes time to develop trust, it takes time to develop an effective team. The time it takes highly depends on the context and on the history between team members and with direct managers. The process of developing trust and to articulate roles within the teams is often referred to as the five-stage model of forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.

Performance evaluation and reward system
In order for effective teamwork to be sustainable, the performance evaluation and reward system must take into account both individual and team performance. Holding the team accountable for results fosters collaboration between team members. Holding individuals accountable for their contribution in the team’s result avoids the social loafing pitfall. Social loafing consists in an individual to underperform in a team but to get away with it because it will not be visible outside of the team. Social loafing damages trust among team members and can result in complete team failure if not handled quickly and decisively.

In a few words, effective teams hold themselves accountable at both team and individual levels.

Therefore, implementing effective teams requires adapting HR practices. There must be an objective way to evaluate the performance of a team, and part of individuals’ reward must be based on team performance.

Goals
Last but not least, effective teams achieve objectives because these objectives are clear, short-term, and they fit within a longer-term purpose. The iterative project cycle is a good example: the project provides an overall goal that can be months or even years in the future while each iteration, lasting typically a few weeks, determines clear short-term expectations. The combination of long-term and short-term objectives is instrumental in helping teams delivering results.