LO2 - Benefits and Limitations of Teams

• under the right conditions, teams make better decisions, develop better products and services, and create a more motivated workforce than do employees working alone.
• Teams generate three motivating forces


  Advantages

  1. Better decisions, products. (employees have a drive to bond and are motivated to fulfil the goals of groups to which they belong.)
  2. Better information sharing and coordination (employees have high accountability to fellow team members, who monitor performance more closely than a traditional supervisor.)
  3. Higher motivation due to team membership (each team member creates a moving performance standard for the others.)
• Challenges of teams

  1. Individuals are better than teams for some tasks
  2. Process losses
  3. Social loafing
• process losses 


  Resources(including time and energy) expended toward team development and maintenance rather than the task.
• Larger teams have higher process losses because understanding, agreeing with, and synchronizing work with many people is more difficult than with few people.
• Brooks’s law


  The principle that adding more people to a late software project only makes it later.
• SOCIAL LOAFING


  The best known motivational process loss
• SOCIAL LOAFING


  occurs when people exert less effort (and usually perform at a lower level) in teams than when working alone.
• SOCIAL LOAFING IS MORE LIKELY TO OCCUR WHEN:

  1. Individual performance is hidden or difficult to distinguish from the performance of other team members.
  2. more common when the work is boring or the team’s overall task has low task significance
  3. more prevalent among team members with low conscientiousness and low agreeableness personality traits, as well as low collectivist values.
  4. more widespread when employees lack motivation to help the team achieve its goals.
• Minimizing social loafing


  1. Form smaller teams
  2. Measure individual performance
  3. Specialize tasks
  4. Increase job enrichment
  5. Increase mindfulness of team obligations
  6. Select motivated, team-oriented employees
• Form smaller teams


  Splitting the team into several smaller groups reduces social loafing because each person’s performance becomes more noticeable and important for team performance.
• Measure individual performance


  Social loafing is minimized when each member’s contribution is measured.
• Specialize tasks


  It is easier to measure individual performance when each team member performs a different work activity.

  For example, rather than pooling their effort for all incoming customer inquiries, each customer service representative might be assigned a particular type of client.
• Increase job enrichment


  Social loafing is minimized when each team member’s job is highly motivating, such as when the work has high task significance or is sufficiently varied and challenging rather than boring.
• Increase mindfulness of team obligations


  Social loafing can be minimized by alerting team members to this problem and asking them to declare their commitment to the team’s performance objectives.
• Select motivated, team-oriented employees


  Employees are less susceptible to social loafing when they identify with the team, have moderate or higher conscientiousness and agreeableness personality traits, and have a fairly high collectivist value orientation.