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Copyright © 2015 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.

2. Groups, Teams, and Their Leadership10
Groups, Teams, and Their Leadership
Chapter
“We are born for cooperation, as are the feet, the hands, the eyelids, and the upper and lower jaws.”
~Marcus Aurelius

3. Introduction
Groups and teams are different than solely the skills, abilities, values, and motives of those who comprise them.
Groups and teams have their own special characteristics.
Groups are essential if leaders are to impact anything beyond their own behavior.
Group perspective looks at how different group characteristics can affect relationships both with the leader and among the followers.

4. Individuals Versus Groups Versus Teams
Team members usually have a stronger sense of identification among themselves than group members do.
Teams have common goals or tasks.
Task independence typically is greater with teams than with groups.
Team members often have more differentiated and specialized roles than group members.
Teams should be considered highly specialized groups.

5. The Nature of Groups
A group is two or more persons interacting with one another in a manner that each person influences and is influenced by each other person.
This definition incorporates the concept of reciprocal influence between leaders and followers.
Group members interact and influence each other.
The definition does not constrain individuals to only one group
Although groups play a pervasive role in society, most people spend little time thinking about the factors that affect group processes and intragroup relationships.

6. Group Size Leader emergence is partly a function of group size.
As groups become larger, cliques are more likely to develop.
Group size can affect a leader’s behavioral style.
Leaders with a large span of control tend to be more directive, spend less time with individual subordinates, and use impersonal methods to influence followers.
Leaders with a small span of control tend to show more consideration and use personal approaches to influence followers.
Group size affects group effectiveness.

7. Group Size (continued)
Additive task: A task where the group’s output simply involves the combination of individual outputs.
Process losses: Inefficiencies created by more and more people working together.
Social loafing: Phenomenon of reduced effort by people when they are not individually accountable for their work.
Social facilitation: People increasing their level of work due to the presence of others.

8. Developmental Stages of Groups
Tuckman’s stages of group development:
Forming
Storming
Norming
Performing
These stages are important because:
People are in many more leaderless groups than they realize.
There are potential relationships between leadership behaviors and group cohesiveness and productivity.
Gersick studied project teams and identified punctuated equilibrium, which suggests that teams do not start work immediately as described by Tuckman.

9. Group Roles
Group roles are sets of expected behaviors associated with particular jobs or positions.
Task roles
Relationship roles
Several types of problems can impede group performance:
Dysfunctional roles
Role conflict
Intrasender role conflict
Intersender role conflict
Interrole conflict
Person-role conflict
Role ambiguity

10. Group Norms
Norms are informal rules groups adopt to regulate and regularize group members’ behavior.
Norms are more likely to be seen as important and apt to be enforced if they:
Facilitate group survival.
Simplify, or make more predictable, what behavior is expected of group members.
Help the group to avoid embarrassing interpersonal problems.
Express the central values of the group and clarify what is distinctive about the group’s identity.

11. Group Cohesion
Group cohesion is the sum of the forces that attract members to a group, provide resistance to leaving it, and motivate them to be active in it—the glue that keeps a group together.
Highly cohesive groups interact with and influence each other more than less cohesive groups.
Greater cohesiveness does not always lead to higher performance.
Highly cohesive groups may have lower absenteeism and lower turnover.
Highly cohesive groups sometimes develop goals contrary to the larger organization’s goals.

12. Group Cohesion (continued)
Overbounding: Tendency of highly cohesive groups to erect what amount to fences or boundaries between themselves and others.
Groupthink: People in highly cohesive groups often become more concerned with striving for unanimity than in objectively appraising different courses of action.
Ollieism: When illegal actions are taken by overly zealous and loyal subordinates who believe that what they are doing will please their leaders.

13. Effective Team Characteristics and Team Building
There are several key characteristics of effective teams.
Teams have a clear mission and high performance standards.
Leaders often evaluate equipment, training facilities, and available outside resources.
Leaders spend a considerable amount of time assessing the technical skills of team members.
Leaders work to secure the resources and equipment necessary for team effectiveness.
Leaders spend time planning and organizing in order to make optimal use of available resources.
Teams have high levels of communication, which minimize interpersonal conflicts.

14. Effective Team Characteristics and Team Building (continued)
The following four variables need to be in place for a team to work effectively:
Task structure
Group boundaries
Appropriate norms
Authority
Hackman and Ginnett developed the concept of organizational shells to help team leaders consider these four variables.

15. Organizational Shells

16. Team Leadership Model
The Team Leadership Model (TLM) consists of three components:
Input
Process
Output
The TLM is a mechanism to:
Identify what a team needs to be effective.
Point the leader either toward roadblocks or toward ways to make the team even more effective than it already is.

17. Systems Theory Applied to Teams
FIGURE 10.2
An Iceberg Metaphor for Systems Theory Applied to Teams

18. Basic TLM Outputs: Outcomes of High-Performance Teams
FIGURE 10.3
Basic TLM Outputs: Outcomes of High-Performance Teams

19. TLM Process Variables: Diagnose the Team Using the Process Variables
FIGURE 10.4
TLM Process Variables: Diagnose the Team Using the Process Variables

20. Leadership Prescriptions of the Model
Ideally, a team should be built like a house or an automobile.
Start with a concept
Create a design.
Engineer it to do what you want it to do.
Manufacture it to meet those specifications.
Three critical functions for team leadership:
Dream
Design
Development

21. Three Functions of TLM Leadership
FIGURE 10.5  
Three Functions of TLM Leadership

22. Team Leadership Model
FIGURE 10.6 
Team Leadership Model

23. Concluding Thoughts about the TLM
Even if a team is well designed, has superior organizational systems, and has access to superior-quality ongoing development, without adequate material resources it is not likely to do well on the output level.
Leaders can influence team effectiveness by:
Ensuring the team has a clear sense of purpose and performance expectations.
Designing or redesigning input stage variables at the individual, organizational, and team design levels.
Improving team performance through ongoing coaching.

24. Factors from the Team Leadership Model and the Interactional Framework

25. Virtual Teams
Challenges are associated with leading geographically dispersed teams (GDTs), also known as virtual teams.
Research shows that five major areas need to change for global teams to work.
Senior management leadership
Innovative use of communication technology
Adoption of an organization design that enhances global operations
Prevalence of trust among team members
The ability to capture the strengths of diverse cultures, languages, and people

26. Virtual Teams (continued)
Leaders of virtual teams need to bear in mind the following research conclusions.
The distance between members is multidimensional.
The impact of such distances on performance is not directly proportional to objective measures of distance.
Differences in the effects that distance seems to have is due at least partially to two intervening variables:
Integrating practices within a virtual team.
Integrating practices between a virtual team and its larger host organization.

27. On the Horizon Collective leadership consists of five approaches:
Team leadership
Network leadership
Shared leadership
Complexity leadership
Collective leadership
Clusters, a new alternative to the traditional idea of teams, are formed outside a company context, but are hired and paid by companies as a unit, as a permanent part of the company.

28. Summary
Group perspective shows that followers’ behaviors can be the result of factors somewhat independent of their individual characteristics.
Leaders should use a team perspective for understanding follower behavior and group performance.
Team Leadership Model suggests that team effectiveness can be best understood in terms of inputs, processes, and outcomes.
By identifying certain process problems in teams, leaders can use the model to diagnose appropriate leverage points for action.