Team Interaction Paradigms and Group Behavior

Teams working within a larger organization often adopt contracts and SLAs that govern how they interact with other teams and define?what they produce and consume.?When the teams' responsibilities and deliverables are well-defined and repetitive, it's natural for a service-oriented paradigm to arise.?A team with a clear charter provides a service for other teams, and the rules of the road for requesting this service are established as is?the quality and timeliness of the deliverables. This creates a vendor/client relationship between teams within the broader organization, and all the terminology, artifacts, measures, and psychology associated with vendor/client?relationships comes to bear.?It's a neat metaphor to manage team relationships and assess productivity?and quality of the work product. But are?there unintended consequences?of this model?

When things go wrong (i.e. when a contract is breached, commitments are not met, or quality is unacceptable), certain natural human behaviors come into play.?Blame is laid on others, and?scapegoat theory and self-serving bias affect the attitudes and actions of the participants.?Scapegoat theory proposes that?people?blame misfortune and problems on outgroups, and this contributes to lingering negative feelings about those outgroups.?Self-serving bias is the opposite--that one takes?credit for success and refuses?responsibility for problems and failures [Baumeister & Bushman, 2014].?When the organizational model facilitates the?natural creation of ingroups and outgroups, our human tendency is to protect the integrity of our ingroup and lay blame and develop negative feelings towards outgroups most closely associated with the failure. Sometimes the failure is the result of incompetency within the team, but it's rarely that cut-and-dry. Despite the complexity and nuance of failure, our human reaction and associated feelings are often more polar.

During the quality renaissance of the 1980's, Deming and others discussed traditional models of vendor / client relationships and their impact on overall quality.?In his fourteen points, Deming called upon management to build trusted, long term relationships with suppliers, and to?break down barriers between departments who contributed to the overall deliverable.?"People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service."?He also advised that we?"eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets?for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force."?Kaoru Ishikawa suggested that "both customers and the suppliers are fully responsible for the control of quality."?This was a new way of thinking about quality and its implication on supply chain?processes and relationship management, but it was born out of a fundamental flaw in and consequences of how these relationships previously?operated.?The analogy to internal team interaction and shared responsibility for?success is clear.?

Donald?Sch?n studied the complex interactions between consultants and clients, and developed the reflective-practitioner model to describe the?way in which solutions can be?explored and knowledge?exchanged between parties in these relationships.?Both consultants and clients are involved in reflection, and by exposing what they know and what they don't know, create a more level playing field?that yields better solutions. This is in contrast to an expert model where knowledge is withheld or hidden to preserve ownership of the expertise, and perhaps protect against blame should that expertise be insufficient to prevent failure.?As we know from theorists, practitioners, and our own experience, some level of failure is inevitable in complex systems, and the way the constituents react to failure is largely determined by the degree to which they feel a sense of responsibility for it.?When organizational constructs create divides between teams (in the name of well defined swim-lanes and areas of responsibility and ownership), the potential for non-constructive treatment of failure is increased.

A?service model is appropriate?for many teams who perform well-defined, repetitive work within an organization.?A formal interface, explicit acceptance criteria, and clear visibility on progress adds discipline and rigor that helps the organization commit resources appropriately and measure productivity.?But such a model can potentially pit teams against each other, create an "us versus them" mentality, and limit?the potential of partnership and teamwork. As the quality initiatives of the 80s explored with vendor relationships in the TQM framework, a partnership model can help the participating teams work together towards a shared?goal.?This may be especially?appropriate for creative endeavors that require novel thinking about what gets built and how best to build it.?If success depends on?co-ownership of a solution, perhaps one that is different than?others that have come before, it also depends on co-ownership of failure. Consider the implications and human dynamics created by your organizational model, and focus not only on optimizing for separation of concerns, specialization, and efficiency, but on how well the organization works together when facing the unexpected.