Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams

Abstract

Teams of people working together for a common purpose have been a centerpiece of human social organization ever since our ancient ancestors first banded together to hunt game, raise families, and defend their communities. Human history is largely a story of people working together in groups to explore, achieve, and conquer. Yet, the modern concept of work in large organizations that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is largely a tale of work as a collection of individual jobs. A variety of global forces unfolding over the last two decades, however, has pushed organizations worldwide to restructure work around teams, to enable more rapid, flexible, and adaptive responses to the unexpected. This shift in the structure of work has made team effectiveness a salient organizational concern. Teams touch our lives everyday and their effectiveness is important to well-being across a wide range of societal functions. There is over 50 years of psychological research-literally thousands of studies-focused on understanding and influencing the processes that underlie team effectiveness. Our goal in this monograph is to sift through this voluminous literature to identify what we know, what we think we know, and what we need to know to improve the effectiveness of work groups and teams. We begin by defining team effectiveness and establishing the conceptual underpinnings of our approach to understanding it. We then turn to our review, which concentrates primarily on topics that have well-developed theoretical and empirical foundations, to ensure that our conclusions and recommendations are on firm footing. Our review begins by focusing on cognitive, motivational/affective, and behavioral team processes-processes that enable team members to combine their resources to resolve task demands and, in so doing, be effective. We then turn our attention to identifying interventions, or "levers," that can shape or align team processes and thereby provide tools and applications that can improve team effectiveness. Topic-specific conclusions and recommendations are given throughout the review. There is a solid foundation for concluding that there is an emerging science of team effectiveness and that findings from this research foundation provide several means to improve team effectiveness. In the concluding section, we summarize our primary findings to highlight specific research, application, and policy recommendations for enhancing the effectiveness of work groups and teams.

The psychology of intelligence analysis: Drivers of prediction accuracy in world politics.

“…Transactive memory systems explain how intimate couples (Wegner, Giuliano, & Hertel, 1985) and familiar groups (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006;Peltokorpi, 2008) divide cognitive labor and perform efficiently. These systems can form even with complete strangers, as stereotypes can serve as "defaults" or proxies for another person's expertise (Wegner, Erber, & Raymond, 1991).…”

Affective mechanisms linking dysfunctional behavior to performance in work teams: A moderated mediation study.

“…Further, researchers have conducted the majority of existing studies at the individual level of analysis. Nevertheless, with the increasing use of teams in organizations (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006), there is mounting interest in dysfunctional behavior as a team-level construct (e.g., Felps et al, 2006). Research on this issue, however, is generally limited to investigating how individuals' team context shapes their dysfunctional behavior (e.g., Robinson & O'Leary-Kelly, 1998).…”

Learning behaviours in the workplace: The role of high‐quality interpersonal relationships and psychological safety

“…Cohen and Levinthal, 1990;Argote, 1999)' (Uzzi and Lancaster, 2003, p. 397). Through a relational process of sharing and exchanging critical information, new ideas and insights are fostered (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2006), thus enabling positive change in work processes and outcomes.…”

“…Learning depends on members sharing knowledge and creating new solutions so things will be done more efficiently and effectively. Thus, learning can be seen as a dynamic behavioural process of interaction and exchange among work unit members (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2006;Kozlowski and Bell, 2007). Similarly, recent research on inter-firm learning suggests that 'learning is a social process, with new benefits and liabilities that are underappreciated in a framework that views learning solely from the perspective of cognition or past organizational experiences (cf.…”