Team Work.I will discuss teamwork from two aspects: control and pressure within teams and danger of group thinking. Both of them, I think, will have a potential influence on the performance of teamwork, and should be paid attention to.
Team Work
Introduction
Nowadays teamwork has become a fashion. It draws us a very attractive picture where "empowered workers work autonomously and collaboratively" (Fulop and Linstead, 1999:209) with high efficiency and output. Just examine the recent popular approaches in management (such as total quality management, lean production and business process reengineering etc.), we can find that teamwork is not only "a central pillar of each one", but "each is also seen as a radical departure from ways of organizing that have dominated the twentieth century" (idib:218). This gives organizations a signal that Embracing teamwork can get rid of all the problems associated with traditional management approaches, and "it is absolutely imperative for the formal organization of work to revolve around a collective form"(ibid). As presented in many management texts, teamwork has many obvious advantages, such as, high employee motivation, high efficiency, high flexibility etc. However, the actual utilization of teamwork in some contemporary organizations shows that what actually happens is not always the same as what we thought it should be. Like other management approaches, teamwork has pitfalls as well as advantages. So organizations, instead of rushing into teamwork for a quick relief from various problems they are facing, should take time to consider the question "is teamwork all that good, what are the negative aspects of it?" In order to answer this question, I think it is important for us to look at aspects that will potentially influence the performance of teamwork. In the following part of my essay, I will discuss teamwork from two aspects: control and pressure within teams and danger of group thinking. Both of them, I think, will have a potential influence on the performance of teamwork, and should be paid attention to.
Control and Pressure within Teams
Different from those working in the traditional management structures, people working in teams have great autonomy. Instead of being told what to do, teams make all decisions on the detailed work arrangement in them. They fire and hire their own members. They coordinate directly with other teams for needed support and coordinate directly with outside suppliers and customers etc. While at the same time managers exercise less direct control. What they do instead is to "get on with developing the "strategic vision""(Fulop and Linstead, 1999:220). The result of this change is a flatter organizational structure with fewer layers between top management and shop floor, thus create a more flexible and loosened "macro-environment " for teams in the organization. The above description of teamwork naturally leads us to the assumption that people working in teams are more "relaxed ' than those working in traditional management structures. However, contrary to this assumption, as put forward by Barker (1993) that "a detailed study of an organization which introduced such teams indicates that members of self-managing teams can experience control just as tightly as if they were subject to the traditional management-determined rule" (cited in Boddy and Paton, 1998: 297).
Here people will ask if there is no direct management control, where is the control from then? The answer is that it is from team itself, from the way team forms and functions. From the basic stages of group development developed by Bruce Tuckman (1965), we can see that at the second stage (the forming stage) team members first " fall into an easy consensus" (Fulop and Linstead, 1999:232) on what should be done while what should not be done, what works while what doesn't work. And then at the stage of norming (the fourth stage), the "easy ...
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Here people will ask if there is no direct management control, where is the control from then? The answer is that it is from team itself, from the way team forms and functions. From the basic stages of group development developed by Bruce Tuckman (1965), we can see that at the second stage (the forming stage) team members first " fall into an easy consensus" (Fulop and Linstead, 1999:232) on what should be done while what should not be done, what works while what doesn't work. And then at the stage of norming (the fourth stage), the "easy consensus" as described by Boddy and Paton "gradually evolved into a set of relatively formal rules, with the additional force that they were backed up by peer pressure." (1998: 297). "The set of relatively formal rules" referred to by Boddy and Paton are called norms in some management texts, which are established standards, goals and acceptable behaviour everyone in teams has to conform to (Fulop and Linstead, 1999: 232),
People working in teams always have the feeling that they are always "watched" by other people, while at the same time they all "watch "other people. The interdependent relationship within teams makes everyone become a supervisor, and thus create a net of discipline force, which keeps everyone in line with the established norms and working collectively to the benefit of the team. Fulop and Linstead call it "unobtrusive or invisible form of control, which enables managers to give workers a sense of autonomy without the manager actually surrendering much control" (1998:230). This kind of "invisible" control as defined by Fulop and Linstead is more powerful and oppressive compared with direct management control, as it is "backed up by peer pressure" as mentioned above.
Teamwork, in some management texts, is referred to as a way of "working smarter, not harder". However, the actual utilization of teamwork found that it is not the fact. My own experience of teamwork in the university could prove this. At the beginning of this term, we had a teamwork session to teach students how to work in teams. One of our team-tasks was to piece together wooden boards in different shapes and length according to the drawing given. We were requested to finish it using as little time as possible. There were altogether 5 teams to do the same task at the same time; and the time used by every team was recorded. The fastest team would be given a prize. Each team had 15 minutes to discuss and practice, and three chances to perform. At first everyone was excited. We discussed very enthusiastically on how to do it. However when we actually started to do the task, the situation was a little different. Everyone became very strict both with other people and with themselves. We kept asking each other to do this way, not to do that way; and pushed everyone to do faster and even faster. Our performance became better and better, while at the same time everyone became stricter and stricter, and more and more nervous. One of my teammates scratched her hands; but no one (including herself) thought she should stop. At our last performance, I was so nervous that I made a mistake and delayed some time. Though my teammates did not criticize me, I could tell from their eyes that they were very unsatisfied. We lost our game; everyone was tired and upset, and I was even more. I could do nothing but to work even harder in the following tasks in order to compensate my mistake. So to me, teamwork is "working smarter and harder".
Here people will ask, "In teamwork there is no fixed standard to judge individual performance, so what forces people to work so hard?" The "no fixed standard" itself is where problem exists. When people come together, what they will naturally do is to compare, "this girl is beautiful, that guy is ugly etc." The same thing happens, when team members come together to work. They compare the performance of their teammates with each other. Through comparison it is obvious to everyone who is performing well while who is not. Since personal success and failure is tied together with the success and failure of the whole team, everyone expects others to do the best. As there is no fixed standard of what the best performance is, the standard of the person who performs best in the team naturally becomes the standard for everyone in the team. Thus as pointed out by James Barker (1993)" team provides a means whereby expected performance by each member is at or close to, the standards set by the highest performing individual in the group" (cited in Fulop and Linstead, 1999: 231).
In addition, there is other point I want to mentions is that, the highest performance standard itself is not "static". As everyone is improving, the best performer today might not be the best performer tomorrow. The standard goes higher and higher and compels everyone (with the support of peer pressure) in the team to work harder and harder to catch up with it. As a result, "team members boost their productive capacity, [however] their ingenuity and potential has been used to pursue organizational objectives alone" (ibid). To people working in teams, it sounds very harsh, however it is the fact From this perspective, the cold-heartness of teamwork is just the same as that in the traditional management structures, which is criticized so much by many management texts.
Catching up with the "non-stopping" performance standard itself is a great pressure. However when it is mixed with the "invisible" control in the team, it becomes even more unendurable. Team, contrary to the image portrayed by some management texts, can "descend into various exploitative practices" (ibid: 230). The control and pressure it imposes on its members are even more severe than those experienced in the traditional management structures. Teamwork goes against its promise of a high quality working life, which might give rise to the resentment among team members in the long run, and will have a negative effect on the performance of team.
The Danger of Group Thinking within Teams
As mentioned by many management texts, one characteristic of team is the diversity of its membership. It is a "pool" of people from different disciplines, who have different skills, different knowledge, different experience, and thus different perspectives. The advantages of diversity are that it can pool the strength of different disciplines in the organization to solve complicated problems; it makes the organization more flexible and respond quickly to the change of the outside world; and most important through the interaction and inter-exchange of team members, organizations can "extract" the knowledge embedded in shop floor and use it to achieve continuous improvement. In one word, teamwork provides a means for the organization to benefit from the diversity of its employees. So diversity is most desired when selecting team members to form a team. However, during the formation of teams, a very frequent scenario is the suppression of differences and conflicts within teams to achieve pre-set common goals. In order to function, team has to go through the stage of norming (as identified by Tuckman) where shared norms are established by team members. Norms as described by Black and Porter are accepted standards, used to guide and discipline the behaviour of individual team members (2000:307). On the one hand norms are very important in teamwork, as it can help to coordinate the action of individual team members, and work collectively to the benefit of the whole team. However, on the other hand, as pointed out by Black and Porter "norms can be thought of as constraining or reducing the variability of actions and attitudes across a set of group members, that is, norms tends to narrow individual differences in behaviour and beliefs" (1999:310). The existence of strong norms tends to "standardize" the way of thinking of team members; makes them to pursue agreement among them; and reject any alternatives and different opinions, even if they are proved to be useful to the group (ibid), To new comers, established norms are what they have to accept without any hesitation. They have to think as other members think, and do as other members do. As concluded by Barker people working in teams "must invest a part of themselves in the team; they must identify strongly with their team' value and goals, its norms and rules, uncommitted workers do not last [in teams]."(1993:435) As a result, team members become more and more uniform and inward-looking. Then here comes the danger of group thinking.
Group thinking is very dangerous. It kills the motivation for innovation within teams, makes teams blind to their mistakes, and sometimes even drives team members to cover up their mistakes. One classical example is the Challenger disaster. The NASA management team was "trapped ' in their previous success and did not believe they could make mistakes. They rejected the engineering opinion that there might be a problem, and made the decision of launch. The result is disaster.
To teams it is a dilemma. On the one hand they need diversity, on the other hand they have to establish norm to narrow diversity in order to function. If it goes too far, it will lead to group thinking, which no organization wants.
Conclusion
"People develop [management] models and theories in response to circumstances, and to the most pressing issue facing managers at the time." (Boddy and Paton, 1998: 44). Teamwork, as a management technique is developed to address the issue of how to "maximize the flexibility " of organizations in order to "meet a rapid changing market' (ibid). However like other management techniques, it is far from perfect. It solves one problem while at the same time add another. So we cannot say that teamwork is a more advanced management technique that it can and must substitute all the other management techniques.
Teamwork only provides an alternative way to organize resources. It "cannot compensate for badly designed organizational processes; nor can they substitute for management's responsibility to define how decisions should be made"(Slack et al, 2001: 291). So organizations, before make decisions to adopt teamwork, should take time to consider "what are the problems they are facing?"; "Can teamwork help to solve these problems?"; and "If so, how can they balance the positive effects and the negative effects of teamwork?"
Reference
Barker, James R. (1993) 'Tightening the iron cage: Concertive control in self-managing teams', Administrative Science Quarterly 38(3): 408-37
Barker, James R. (1999): The discipline of Teamwork. United States of America SAGE Publication Inc.
Black, J. Stewart and Porter, Lyman W. (2000): Management- Meeting New Challenges. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Boddy, David and Paton, Robert (1998): Management - An Introduction. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall.
Fulop Liz and Linstead, Stephen (1999): Management - A Critical Text. Hampshire and London: MACMILLAN PRESS LTD.
Slack, Nigel, Chambers, Stuard and Johnston, Robert (2001): Operations Management. England: Pearson Education Limited
