Forget team working if you want to succeed

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John Hepworth returns to follow his post on the Learning Organisation to look at the value, or lack of it, with team working and its impact upon organisational success. (Ed Scrivener)

Forget team working if you want to succeed

There is a commonly held view that teams in business are better than individuals at achieving outcomes. Team working after all is defined in most business sectors as a desired competency; typically, it will be defined as “a group working towards a common goal or set of goals. This takes after Fombrun (1984) and the notion of a unitarist approach to human resource management as employed by organisations and their managers.

The basic premise of ‘unitarism’ is one of an organisation – Utopian of course – free from conflict, in that employers and employees are in agreement about what they want to achieve; by definition then there are no trade unions as employers manage their employees in such a way to take account of any issues, so long as all are focused on the ‘common goal’. Nice thought. Of course, in practice, this is where the concepts of employee engagement arise and the desire too for groups of people to work together in teams for the benefit of themselves and the organisation as a whole.

Teams then are groups – we naturally have then in any size of organisation and their existence is affected by the way they behave. Armstrong (2012) highlights just a few elements of groups that impact on success – for the ‘team’ (in an organisation) and for the organisation itself. For instance: the way that the team interacts and networks. The formal structure may well divide departments into Finance, Customer Support and so on, but the real work of the team goes on when the informal networking happens – as Armstrong states, the ‘fluid interactions across the structure’ (p.127). Research demonstrates that individuals can often get far more achieved in this informal way than through the formal elements of the organisation. Individuals can forge alliances and communicate using the ‘grapevine’.

Teams are perhaps here to stay because the conventional wisdom of organisation design states that you have to organise your company to meet customer needs, or by product or geographical region (see the many writings of Galbraith, J (1973), or Hannum, M (2000) as examples of how the organisation works). Yet when it comes to team working creating success, the jury is very much still ‘out’. Take Hackman (2009), writing in the Harvard Business Review. His focus is on the function of the team and the way the team is managed – the latter being the subject of many management training courses throughout the years. These courses will inevitably look at Adair (2006) and his excellent research model – excellent in that it is simple to convey to new managers for instance.

Yet, Hackman points to several ‘failings’ in teams following his research. Failure for example to actually build a team that is inter-dependent on its members for success. Often, a ‘performing unit’ will be referred to as a team and yet management of that team is biased towards the individual needs of its members. Adair would have something to say about that of course – get the balance right then!

Hackman points to the skills of team working within its members. Often an assumption is made that teams will pick these up but more likely – again to dip into Tuckman (1965) – they will remain in ‘storm’ mode as they have not been equipped by the organisation or the leader to address the challenges they face and move towards ‘norming’ and ‘performing’. Hackman’s view on this may be summarised as the need then for managers to coach their staff. It may not seem ‘rocket science’ to state this, but research has shown that if teams are coached at the start of a project, at the mid-point and at the end, they develop high-performing behaviours and outcomes.

So – and this is the big question – not all teams can be formed along linear, project lines. How can they be improved? Hackman seems to be arguing that there are four fundamentals that COULD improve team working, to quote:

“…1. Who decides? Who has the right to make decisions about how the work will be carried out, and to determine how problems that develop will be resolved? 2. Who is responsible? Where do responsibility and accountability for performance outcomes ultimately reside? 3. Who gains? How are monetary rewards allocated among the individuals and groups that helped generate them? 4. Who learns? How are opportunities for learning, growth, and career advancement distributed among organization members?...” (p.261).

Teams better than individuals? The outstanding question then is how business helps all employees reap the benefits of both individual development and team success.

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Discuss HR is the HR blog written by members of Human Resources UK, the 10,000 member strong LinkedIn group dedicated to the HR professionals in the UK.  Discuss HR is published twice weekly and looks to take an insightful, informative and sometimes irreverent view on the world of HR – all with the purpose of generating a discussion.

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