Schein (1988) and Bell (1992) promote the idea that teams are about socialising and developing individual members as well as meeting task objectives.
Nias et al. (1989) observed that effective teamwork, including the open and good-humoured discussion of classroom successes and failures, became possible only when colleagues already liked each other on a personal level.
Mutual accountability – If the leader is accountable, then why should members work so hard, if the team is accountable as a whole, then individuals will work hard for the credit. A culture of publicly blaming each other will be avoided at all costs, and weaknesses will be confined to group member’s knowledge only.
Commitment – what sets apart high performance teams is the degree of commitment towards one another. Each member will genuinely help other members to achieve both personal and professional goals (Katzenbach and Smith (1993, p.65)). Such commitments go beyond company activities and often beyond the life of the team itself. Such teams show qualities such as: quality work, mutual trust, taking risks on people, giving talent the chance to grow and fail, being there for one another and having a good time (Katzenbach and Smith (1993, p.76)).
Conflict in teams.
O’Neill (1997) offers the following definition for teams suggesting conflict is an essential part of the process for a successful team,
‘A team is a small group of people who recognise the need for constructive conflict when working together in order for them to make, implement and support workable decisions.
Stephenson (1985, p.105) supports this idea by stating conflict is present in all organisations and is the ‘inevitable outcome of interdependence linked with the scarcity of resources’. More often we see different interest groups in schools and colleges being encouraged to compete for limited resources causing more conflict. Stephenson (1985, p.105) goes on to say that conflict can be constructive if used well, and destructive if conflict is ignored or by-passed.
Dalin and Rolff (1993, p.28) talks about constructive conflicts,
‘Instead of avoiding conflicts, the IDP (a structured school improvement programme throughout northern Europe) ‘uses’ conflicts as opportunities for understanding the reality of the school, for raising key issues related to participants’ perceptions of reality, and for exploring ways in which energy ‘stored’ in conflicts can be released for the benefit of the school. Conflicts offer opportunities for learning because they often provide a chance for clarifying issues, for putting unresolved issues on the table and for helping to understand another point of view’.
Stuck teams.
Stuck teams are recognised by the following characteristics (Katzenbach and Smith (1993, p.151))
- A loss of energy or enthusiasm (‘what a waste of time’)
- A sense of helplessness (‘there’s nothing anyone can do’)
- A lack of purpose or identity (‘we have no clue as to what this is all about’)
- Listless, unconstructive and one sided discussions without candour (‘no body wants to talk about what’s really going on’)
- Meeting in which the agenda is more important than the outcome (‘it’s all show-and-tell for the boss)
- Cynicism and mistrust (‘I knew this teamwork stuff was a load of crap’)
- Interpersonal attacks made behind people’s backs and to outsiders (‘Dave has never pulled his own weight and never will’)
- Lots of finger pointing at top management and the rest of the organisation (‘if this effort is so important, why don’t they give us more resources?’)
In the worst cases, team stop trying to improve team performance, people become demoralised, and turn away from the whole team approach.
Katzenbach and Smith (1993, p.160) describes ways in which teams get ‘unstuck’
- Revisit the basics – rethink purposes, approaches and performance goals.
- Go for small wins – small achievements will slowly improve moral and performance.
- Inject new information and approaches – fresh facts, different perspectives and new information play a major role in the development of teams.
- Take advantage of facilitators or training – successful facilitators will go further than addressing personal feelings and interpersonal conflicts, they bring problem solving, communication, interpersonal and teamwork skills back into stuck teams and get them moving in a constructive direction.
- Change the team’s membership, including the team leader – this will provide fresh input and change the team dynamics.
Limitations of teams.
O’Neill (1997) mentions two factors that go against the working of teams in education
- Teachers spend most of their working day physically isolated from colleagues. And the concept of a team once they set foot in the classroom is relatively in valid. Convery (1992) distinguishes between his willingness to dissect curriculum prescriptions with colleagues in the staffroom and his reluctance to talk openly through personal anxieties about his own teaching with the very same people.
- Teachers value authority and the ability to exert control. This is seen most clearly both in the respect of formal status (that of the head-teacher) and in the expectation that individual teachers must develop the ability to ‘control’ their students. They have got accustomed to and many enjoy the autonomy of their own classroom. On an Institutional level, staffing structures, demarcations of responsibility and salary scales all remain hierarchical where authority is accepted and contradict the whole idea of a team structure.
Clement and Staessens (1993, p.147) argue that both collegiality and autonomy are necessary in running an effective school. Managing the various forms of collegiality and autonomy is crucial in terms of stimulating or stunting the growth of opportunities for professional development.
In our society individual responsibility is hammered home, from teachers, parents, religious leaders, not group responsibility. Individuals get rewarded or punished depending on their deeds, not groups. Whenever things go wrong, or even right we ask who was responsible usually pointing to individuals, we are not satisfied with a successful football team; we want to know who the best player was, who the man of the match was, and various other individual statistics.
Finally an interesting description offered by Butt et al. (1992, p.65) of a teachers experience remind us of the importance of all members being involved at all times:
I became a ‘closet teacher’, in that I would listen to suggestions, not offering any suggestions, and then ‘do my own thing’. I found great success with this mode of operating and up to a few years ago, I hesitated to share any of my strategies/workshops/worksheets/lessons I developed on my own. Becoming an administrator forced me into sharing, for I wanted to provide teachers with access to as many resources as possible – the better the programmes they had, the better it was for the school.
INVESTIGATION.
The research tool elected for use was by a questionnaire (Refer to Appendix C for the actual questionnaire used). It became apparent whilst discussing with colleagues their attitudes towards teams in TSI, without an anonymous individualised form of data collection, many views would be ignored, ‘kept secret’ and/or could easily be influenced by the dynamics of any group discussion. It was also important to empower the respondent to freely give his views, or as Johnson (1997, p.37) says about questionnaires they are
‘in the hands of the respondent and is completed by him or her’.
The questions (actually statements) themselves were designed from the Literature review and through discussions with colleagues on team management issues in TSI. Piloting the questionnaire proved beneficial, weaknesses in the survey were noticed when clarity was requested to understand the statements. These statements were subsequently improved.
Rather than a simple yes/no response type questionnaire it was more accurate to rate responses, indicating to some degree the strength of agreement with a statement. Many of the statements and resulting responses dealt with people’s opinions and attitudes, which rarely produce such polarised responses as yes or no. There were six possible responses: strongly agree, moderately agree, neutral, moderately disagree, strongly disagree and unable to rate.
Due to the impersonal nature of the questionnaire and the implicit difficulty in sensing whether responses were completely true feelings of the respondent, it became important to follow up the questionnaire with interviews, ensuring that the full benefit had been achieved from the questionnaire. Bell (1987, p.70), suggests that a skilled interviewer can ‘follow up ideas, probe responses and investigate motives and feelings, which the questionnaire cannot do’. Those personal elements such as tone of voice, body language and facial expression can give an indication of thoughts that can be followed up by further questioning for clarity (Johnson 1994, p.45).
Interviews were semi-structured based around the questionnaire allowing the individual to speak freely about his views and giving the interviewer a chance to use probing questions to achieve a clearer understanding by more complex responses from the interviewee. As a rapport already existed between interviewer and interviewee the need for a fully structured interview seemed inefficient, when so much more information could be extracted. On the other hand the freedom of an unstructured interview relies heavily on the skills of the interviewer in extracting specialist knowledge Johnson (1994, p.47), it was seen as inappropriate to use the unstructured interview in this study. In the main, the semi-structured interview worked well, in that many of the interviewees were focussed in their thinking from the questionnaire. Through the interviews it was noticed that far more thought had gone into their questionnaire responses than was initially envisaged, probably due to the resulting discussions that took place around the institution from the questionnaire.
The sample was limited to twenty lecturers involved in a variety of teams and the follow up interviews to five members of different teams (curriculum design team, mathematics team, middle management team, cross curricular team and an officer’s team). All questionnaires were completed as respondents were within easy access and were often gently encouraged to complete the survey.
Triangulation of the data is important in strengthening the validity of the results. Cohen and Manion (1994, p.233) stressed that
‘The researcher needs to be confident that the data generated is not simply artefacts of one specific method of collection’.
In this simple study by using two methods of data collection a better understanding of perceptions was achieved, in comparison to only using a questionnaire, or if only interviews had been the source of data.
In order to help aggregate the data into an entity, mean values for questionnaire responses were calculated and used to analyse views. Responses that were ‘strongly agree’ were assigned a rating of 1, ‘moderately agree’ was given a 2, ‘neutral’ – 3, ‘moderately disagree’ – 4, ‘strongly disagree’ – 5. The calculated mean value was then rounded to the nearest whole number value and then translated back to the appropriate response. For example, for statement 1 – ‘Teams contain ten members or less’, 18 responded ‘strongly agree’, 0 – ‘moderately agree’, 0 – ‘neutral’, 0 – ‘moderately disagree’, 2 – ‘strongly disagree’.
So the mean value becomes: (18x1) + (0x2) + (0x3) + (0x4) + (2x5) = 1.40
20
Rounding gives us a value of 1, which translates to a mean response for our sample that ‘strongly agree’ with the statement. If a person responded with ‘unable to rate’ the sample was reduced to 19 and reasons for this response were then investigated at the interview stage.
(The weakness in this particular question is obvious as a quantity was requested. Katzenbach and Smith’s (1993, p.45) clarification of their definition of teams indicated ten or less was an ideal number for members in a team, the statement was tolerated giving the investigator an idea if TSI management held similar views).
All statements were written in a manner that describe successful teams in accordance with the literature, if a respondent ‘strongly agrees’ to a statement regarding practices at TSI, he would be agreeing with the literature view of successful teams also, and TSI would appear to be running a successful team. The mean rating as described above will be closer to 1. Similarly unsuccessful teams would be indicated by a strongly disagree response and a mean rating closer to 5.
Statements were grouped into five different categories:
- Choosing a team
- Working nature of the team
- External factors
- Rapport building opportunities
- Dealing with Conflict
Mean values of the mean ratings were taken for each group of statements. These were represented on a number line ranging from 1 to 5. This graphically described whether TSI was operating a successful team structure (1) or a poorly operating team structure (5) compared with the findings of the literature review. (See appendix B).
Analysis.
Choosing a team at TSI has its own inbred weaknesses, when selecting team members a compromise is regularly struck where the best mix of talent is sacrificed for the need to train local UAE staff, this was found after probing questions related to statement 2 were asked. This is also in accordance with government efforts at becoming less reliant on talented staff from overseas.
It was found that in some cases selection into a team is all about networking and show. If a senior military officer is part of a team, then others will push to get into the same team, in an attempt to further their own career by impressing the right people. Membership into the group is achieved by ‘friends helping friends’ (statement 3), or abusing ones position of authority stepping into the group, over a perhaps more talented junior member of the organization (statement 4). Crowd or herd behaviour often results due to the mismatch of training required, abilities and lack of willingness to state one’s true feelings in case they contradict those very people they are trying to impress.
It is difficult to escape these selection methods, hierarchy is set up in such a way that the local UAE staff look out for their friends and family over talent, coupled with the fact that the amount of training these officers need is vast, goes against a team approach. The complimentary mix of skills required in successful teams described by Katzenbach and Smith (1993, p.45) and Belbin (1993) seem to have largely been ignored to the detriment of TSI.
Working nature of the team
External factors
Team members at TSI surprisingly share similar experiences regardless of which team they belong to, it would seem that the current culture of working teams has been developed and reinforced and is almost set in stone.
O’Neill (1997), states that permanent teams are likely to have settled work and social patterns, norms which are highly resistant to change even on the part of an active leader. Groups formed to address ad hoc tasks are possibly more vulnerable, or amenable to radical leadership action.
In every team there are one or two experienced members that seem to carry the other members through the team’s aims and objectives, these two experienced members keep power and control close to themselves and are heavily relied upon by the others. These ‘leaders’ seem to have more information and guidance from superiors indicated by statements 15 and 18, and use the information to bolster their own standing rather than unreservedly share the information with the team for its overall improvement (statements 8 and 11). This instantly creates a feeling of a hierarchical group rather than a fully functioning team.
The counter argument to this is interesting, some individuals feel that they can outperform teams by themselves, and often feel as though they are carrying the other members by themselves, through some form of training programme for less able colleagues. They feel that meetings just waste their time, when they could be completing other more important tasks, being more productive elsewhere. Some may feel that meetings are completely unproductive because the communication methods often result in complaints rather than constructive results
Some actually don’t feel comfortable working or sharing with others. The whole group thing could be intimidating for the individual that doesn’t like to speak out, or risk making commitments that they may not be able to keep or sharing unconsolidated views they may be questioned on at a later date.
Some don’t like to depend on others, or share responsibility for their errors. Some may need to get things done their way.
Statement 8 produced some interesting comments in subsequent interviews. Members felt that there was not a free sharing of ideas to benefit the group, some individuals were being selfish and wanted to take credit for their own abilities and maybe even other’s abilities passing, them off as their own. A situation was described by 2 interviewees, that when the commander or a high ranking officer appeared to observe a meeting, there would be an increase in activity and an unprecedented sharing of information and viewpoints that would benefit the team, whereas ordinarily the same people would be seen to drag their feet in the absence of a high ranking officer to apportion credit for the individuals efforts.
Unfortunately officers in power promote and demote at will, based on the most trivial reasons, even if supervisors were asked about performance of certain individuals, the supervisors would play down the individuals abilities in order not to jeopardize there own position in the organization, they worry about talented subordinates being promoted above them.
Statement 9 indicated that in some cases workloads are unevenly delegated depending on a leaders decision, which results in a varying degree of satisfactory completion of the task, members felt they were doing all the work for someone else to get the credit. In other cases the leader would take on the task himself as he didn’t trust his members to complete the task to a high standard. Members initially felt happy that their leader kept their workload to a minimum, but soon realized that they were not involved in any decision making process, discussion of practices and recommendations and generally all power attributed to a group is kept in his hands. In either case members didn’t feel part of a whole collaborated process, and responded to statement 10 as not whole heartedly implementing outcomes or recommendations.
This in turn lead to public blaming and finger pointing outside the group as members felt they didn’t really have a voice that would influence decisions made within the group (statement 12).
Mistrust and poor communications were commented upon during the interviews, especially when Arabic speakers (influential voices with the ears of superior officers) speak to each other in their native language without explaining their thoughts to the English speaking (talented) staff.
It is noticed that when an officer would chair a meeting, that they would sit behind a big desk and the rest of the team would sit on smaller chairs around the room, reinforcing his ‘superior’ position, he would generally wish to continue promoting this idea even though much of the real talent is in front of him and needs to be heard. As a consequence many members remain quiet waiting for this officer to speak. Often interruptions like phone calls keep members waiting and in some way promote the prestige and power of this leader making the group a very hierarchical and non collaborative team.
From statement 17 we find that people who control resources at TSI are a problem, as these are not often distributed effectively, many users of the resources start to use behind the scenes lobbying tactics to get what they want.
When groups at TSI fail to perform, value its members, and maybe even look for scapegoats, then members are less likely to resign their fate to that group. Leaders fail to hold themselves accountable and fail to make clear and meaningful performance demands. Groups become more involved with internal politics which lead to a mutual mistrust and a lack of openness that teams depend on. The politics play on individuals insecurities which further isolate that individual, affecting his conviction and courage to invest in a team approach.
Rapport building opportunities
This is probably the greatest lost opportunity for staff at TSI for team building. Outside of the working environment local UAE national staff, European foreign hire staff and staff from Arab speaking countries/Indian subcontinent rarely mix with each other. Reasons given through interview were: the UAE staff preferred to spend their free time with their relatively large families, whereas many of the European staff was single or as is the case of the relatively poorly paid Arab speaking staff and Indian subcontinent staff are here without their families. Alcohol related social events provide its own divide, where a significant number of European staff will vote with there feet and prefer to not attend unless there is alcohol present, equally the Arab staff will refuse to attend if there is alcohol present. A further divide occurs with position and salary; some colleagues will clearly not be able to afford some of the costs related to socializing for example restaurant bill, transport issues.
TSI management needs to realize the benefits of informal social interactions as described in the literature review by Katzenbach and Smith (1993), Schein (1988), Bell (1992) and Nias (1989) and extend them throughout TSI to include all parties in an attempt to find solutions to this problem.
Dealing with Conflict
From statements 21 and 22 we find that conflict is often ignored, the culture of conflict is not a very constructive one at TSI, as individuals need to have good training and understanding of practices before they can actually put forward their arguments and disagree with others. Many avoid conflict for two main reasons, firstly the fear of a bad impression in front of senior colleagues which have in the past effected promotion and secondly a large gap in training between Arab and European staff leads to a more hierarchical mode of operation.
‘Management interventions are uncommon and many teams remain stuck or simply die’ was the comment from one lecturer (statement 23). When management do get involved, it is more than likely that they go for a ‘quick-fix’ solution without really analysing the problem. Intervention by management in this way often burdens the group, as one teacher mentioned ‘it becomes clear to everyone that we have failed in our task as senior management only get involved when we fail.’ The effect of the intervention often results in removal or replacement of individuals and sometimes a lost opportunity for learning through overcoming obstacles results. The team misses out on strengthening itself, building confidence and effective development of working practices and skills as described in the literature review by O’Neill (1997), Stephenson (1985), Dahlin and Rolff (1993).
Statement 24 indicated time was given for groups to meet, but this time was used in a very hierarchical manner. The teams rarely operated effectively and always rushed to leave meetings having little personal pride in its outcomes. Conflict was rare as ultimately the leader held all the power.
Paechter (1995) suggests that, without significant time set aside at the outset for the clarification and acknowledgement of participants’ different purposes and viewpoints, a workable, worthwhile consensus may never be achieved.
A worse situation exists in TSI, when people’s viewpoints are ignored, a lack of commitment from team members result in failure when proposals need to be implemented and/or promoted to other members of staff outside of the team.
It would seem more attention needs to be given on how teams operate in TSI rather than just giving them time to meet.
Conclusion
Teams bring complimentary skills and experiences together in one place hopefully to solve tasks in a better way than an individual could. Teams are committed to a common purpose and a specific set of performance goals. Its members are committed to achieve the teams’ purposes and hold each other fully and jointly accountable. Teams establish good communications from the outset, and are able to deal without being threatened, changing events and demands, better than an individual would in the whole organisation. Team members have a special bond with each other, in overcoming difficulties, conflicts and barriers to success, interpersonal skills and friendship is strengthened.
Coleman and Bush (1994, p.266) suggest that educators like teams:
‘because they encourage the participation of teachers in decision-making, leading to a sense of ownership and an enhanced prospect of successful innovation. One of the main features of collegiality is its emphasis on teamwork’.
TSI has a long way to go in developing its team culture to operate effectively, the problems of ‘friends helping friends’ at the moment often alienate many and hide weaknesses of others. The fear of individuals not being credited, praised or rewarded for their work often drives them to keep their views to themselves and refuse in sharing their good ideas (if lecturers feel safe they will share). Short sighted team leaders and senior managers promote their own power and influence rather than share information to benefit the team as a whole. Socialising and rapport building between colleagues is rare, and opportunities to avoid mistrust and intolerance are lost. Conflict in teams is not allowed and unable to develop to a positive conclusion, losing the chance in helping understanding and strengthening the team.
Adair (1988) hits the nail on the head when he describes the time consuming conflict that exists in TSI with the need to balance a wish to get things done with the development of individuals and that of the team as a whole. This often results in teachers in TSI that seem to revel in autonomy of their own classroom and rarely share within the team environment (O’Neill (1997)).
Recommendation to improve team effectiveness for TSI.
- Establish urgency and direction – team members need to believe that the team has urgent and worthwhile purposes and they want to know what the expectations are.
- Select numbers based on skills and skill potential, not personalities – there must be a compliment of skills required to do a job, they should include – 1). Technical and functional skills. 2). Problem solving skills. 3). Interpersonal skills.
- Pay particular attention to first meetings and actions – initial impressions mean a great deal, everyone is analysing and assessing each other in a heightened state of alertness when they first meet, especially leaders are doing.
- Set some clear rules of behaviour – regarding attendance (no interruption to attend phone calls), discussion (no sacred cows), confidentiality (the only things that leave this room is what we agree will leave this room), analytical approach (facts are friendly), end product orientation (every one gets assignments and does them), constructive confrontation (no finger pointing), contributions (everyone does real work – pulls their own weight).
- Set and seize upon a few immediate performance-orientated tasks and goals – challenging yet achievable tasks will forge good working relationships early on.
- Challenge the group regularly with fresh facts and information – this causes teams to redefine and enrich its understanding of the performance challenge, this helps shape common purpose, set clearer goals and improve on a common approach.
- Spend lots of time together – especially at the beginning, both scheduled and unscheduled meetings to develop personal bonding and interpersonal understanding.
- Exploit the power of positive feedback, recognition and reward – this helps shape new desirable behaviours for example, the contribution of a shy person should be given positive reinforcement so future contributions are encouraged. When members take risks in addressing sensitive conflict-ridden issues, they should be dealt with positively to show openness.
- The systems of promotion, praise and credit must be made fairer and formalised. Hopefully promoting unreserved sharing of views.
- Communication must be improved allowing free access to information and Arabic conversations should be translated for English speaking staff or vice versa if necessary.
- Minutes should be thorough and agreed by all.
Recommendations for further study.
TSI really needs to understand the benefits of social interactions across all dividing lines whether they are cultural, financial or language barriers. An investigation into why opportunities are not organised by management would be useful, with a view to overcome issues and implement change. This would be a good start in improving team working in TSI.
Appendix A: Results of staff survey.
Working nature of the team
External factors
Rapport building opportunities
Dealing with Conflict
Appendix B: Number lines showing TSI position when comparing how teams in TSI perform compared with the literature on ‘successful teams’
Choosing a team (3.35)
| | | ↓ | |
1 2 3 4 5
↑ ↑
Highly Successful teams Poor teams
Working nature of the team (4.04)
| | | |↓ |
1 2 3 4 5
↑ ↑
Highly Successful teams Poor teams
External factors (3.76)
| | | ↓ | |
1 2 3 4 5
↑ ↑
Highly Successful teams Poor teams
Rapport building opportunities (5.00)
| | | | ↓
1 2 3 4 5
↑ ↑
Highly Successful teams Poor teams
Dealing with conflict (3.65)
| | | ↓ | |
1 2 3 4 5
↑ ↑
Highly Successful teams Poor teams
Appendix C: Questionnaire.
Working nature of the team
External factors
Rapport building opportunities
Dealing with Conflict
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Bell, J. (1987) Doing Your Research Project, a Guide for First-Time Researchers in Education and Social Sciences, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Butt, R., Raymond, D., McCue, G. and Yamagishi, L. (1992) Collaborative autobiography and the Teachers Voice, in Goodson, I. (ed) Studying Teachers’ Lives, London: Routledge.
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Convery, A. (1992) Insight, Direction and Support: a Case Study of Collaborative Enquiry in Classroom Research, in Biott, C. and Nias, J. (ed) Working and Learning Together for Change, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Dalin, P. and Rolff, H.G. (1993) Changing the School Culture, London: Cassell.
Everard, K.B. and Morris, G. (1990) Effective School Management, 2nd Edition, London: Paul Chapman.
Johnson, D. (1994) Research Methods in Educational Management, Harlow: Longman.
Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K. (1993) The Wisdom of Teams, New York: Harper Business.
Nias, J., Southworth, G. and Yeomans, R. (1989) Staff Relationships in the Primary School, London: Cassell.
O’Neill, J. (1997) Managing Through Teams, in Bush, T. and Middlewood, D. M. Managing People in Education, London: Paul Chapman.
Paechter, C. (1995) Crossing Subject Boundaries, the Micro-Politics of Curriculum Innovation, London: HMSO.
Schein, E. (1988) Organisational Psychology, 3rd Edition, Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall.
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