1.7: Factors Affecting Team Performance

Group Cohesiveness

Team cohesion is the strength and extent of interpersonal connection existing among the members of a group. It is this interpersonal bond that causes members to participate readily and remain motivated to accomplish the set goals. Cohesive teams have an attitude of “we-ness.”^[1]

Numerous factors may contribute to team cohesiveness, including;

• Size. The bigger the team, the less satisfied members tend to be. When teams get too large, members find it harder to interact closely with other members; a few members tend to dominate team activities, and conflict becomes more likely.
• Similarity. People usually get along better with people like themselves, and teams are generally more cohesive when members perceive fellow members as people who share their own attitudes and experience.
• Success. When teams are successful, members are satisfied, and other people are more likely to be attracted to their teams.
• Exclusiveness. The harder it is to get into a group, the happier the people who are already in it. Team status also increases members’ satisfaction.
• Time. The more time a group spends together, the stronger the bond between them will be. By interacting more often, members learn about each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and skills.
• Competition. Membership is valued more highly when there is motivation to achieve common goals and outperform other teams.
  Equitable and inclusive practices. Members value and celebrate each person’s authenticity, identity, and the unique perspectives that come with those; team members also work to create inclusive and equitable practices in their day-to-day teamwork.

Maintaining team focus on broad organizational goals is crucial. If members get too wrapped up in immediate team goals, the whole team may lose sight of the larger organizational goals toward which it is supposed to be working.

Skills for Effective Teamwork

Sometimes we hear about a sports team made up of mostly average players who win a championship because of coaching genius, flawless teamwork, and superhuman determination. But not terribly often. In fact, we usually hear about such teams simply because they are newsworthy — exceptions to the rule. Typically, a team performs well because its members possess some level of talent. Members’ talents must also be managed in a collective effort to achieve a common goal.

In the final analysis, a team can succeed only if its members possess some managerial skills. In particular, every team requires some combination of these four sets of skills:

• Communication skills. The ways in which members communicate can positively and negatively affect relationships within the team and outside the team with managers, customers, vendors, etc.
• Technical skills. Teams must perform certain tasks; therefore, they need people with the skills to perform them. For example, if your project calls for a lot of math work, it is good to have someone with the necessary quantitative skills.
• Decision-making and problem-solving skills. Because every task is subject to problems, and because handling every problem means deciding on the best solution, it is good to have members who are skilled in identifying problems, evaluating alternative solutions, and deciding on the best options.
• Interpersonal skills. Because teams need direction and motivation and depend on communication, every group benefits from members who know how to listen, provide feedback, and resolve conflict. Some members must also be good at communicating the team’s goals and needs to outsiders.

The key is ultimately to have the right mix of these skills. Remember, too, that no team needs to possess all these skills — never mind the right balance of them — from day one. In many cases, a team gains certain skills only when members volunteer for certain tasks and perfect their skills in the process of performing them. For the same reason, effective teamwork develops over time as team members learn how to handle various team-based tasks. In a sense, teamwork is always a work in progress.

Factors that Erode Team Performance

Just as there are factors and behaviours that contribute to teams working well together, there are some common factors that keep teams from working well together.

• Groupthink. It is easy for leaders to direct members toward team goals when members are all on the same page, i.e., when there is a basic willingness to conform to the team’s rules. When there is too much conformity, however, the group can become ineffective; it may resist fresh ideas and, what’s worse, end up adopting its own dysfunctional tendencies as its way of doing things. Such tendencies may also encourage a phenomenon known as groupthink, or the tendency to conform to group pressure in making decisions, while failing to think critically or consider outside influences.
• Lack of motivation and frustration. Remember that teams are composed of people, and regardless of whatever roles they happen to be playing at a given time, people are subject to psychological ups and downs. As members of workplace teams, they need motivation, and when motivation is low, so are effectiveness and productivity. The difficulty of maintaining a high level of motivation is the chief cause of frustration among members of teams. As such, it is also a chief cause of ineffective teamwork, and that is one reason why more employers now look for the ability to develop and sustain motivation when they are hiring new managers.
• Unwillingness to cooperate. Failure to cooperate can occur when members do not or would not commit to a common goal or set of activities. What if, for example, half the members of a product development team want to create a brand-new product and half want to improve an existing product? The entire team may get stuck on this point of contention for weeks or even months. Lack of cooperation between teams can also be problematic for an organization.
• Lack of managerial support. Every team requires organizational resources to achieve its goals, and if management is not willing to commit the needed resources, e.g., funding or key personnel, a team will probably fall short of those goals.
• Failure of managers to delegate authority. Team leaders are often chosen from the ranks of successful supervisors; first-line managers who give instructions on a day-to-day basis and expect them to be carried out. This approach to workplace activities may not work very well in leading a team, and the success of this approach depends on building consensus and letting people make their own decisions.

Resolving Team Conflict

Team conflict is the breakdown of interpersonal relationships between members of a team. Common reasons for team conflict include the following:

• Misunderstandings or poor communication skills
• Differing opinions, viewpoints, or personalities
• Biases and stereotypes
• Variations in learning and processing styles
• Perceptions of unfairness