‘High performance’ teams that outperform expectations are often more an aspiration than a common manifestation for organizations. Adjunct Assistant Professor Chung Yuen Kay considers the reasons for this and suggests how corporate leaders can create environments that inspire high performing teams.
The idea of the team has caught hold of the imagination of modern management. Teams are expected to improve performance, reduce production costs, speed up innovations, enhance product quality, utilize new technologies, and increase employee participation.
Nevertheless, Adjunct Assistant Professor Chung Yuen Kay cautions that “teamwork can be very difficult because it is open to complex interpersonal psychological issues.”
Teams are a means but whether they result in positive or negative synergy, “social facilitation” or “social loafing” depends on how well they are managed. Members of overly cohesive teams may succumb to pressure to conform leading to poor, and even disastrous decisions. Inadequate individual and team goal setting, performance feedback mechanisms, reward systems, and project management skills can also lead to team weakness.
What then must corporate leaders do to build a healthy team environment?
Adjunct Asst Prof Chung explained that improving team effectiveness requires substantial time and effort. To build and manage teams well, managers need to implement infrastructure that promotes teamwork, such as placing strong emphasis on team-working ability during recruitment and selection, emphasizing team skills and behaviors through continuous in-house training, and reinforcing the importance of teamwork through the appraisal and reward systems.
Adjunct Asst Prof Chung advised that it was important to keep both ‘performance’ and ‘viability’ in mind in measuring team effectiveness. Thus, teams need to ensure the successful delivery of an output to customers, while remaining focused on the elements of continuity, commitment, cohesion and capability.
Effective team managers and members are those who stay vigilant to threats to teamwork and alert to opportunities to induce synergy.
Drawing from her experience, Adjunct Asst Prof Chung pointed out that it was crucial to ensure that the dimensions of task, people and relationships, which form the internal system of teamwork, be monitored at the outset. Managers need to consider issues like the exact nature of work that needs to be performed by the team, the kinds of technical, task management and interpersonal skills that are required, the level of optimal diversity, the methods to engender cohesiveness, the norms that should be in place, and the roles that would be negotiated.
With performance evaluation vital to effective team operations, Adjunct Asst Prof Chung adds that “it is important not just to look at results but also the process.” She believes that aside from productivity, basic performance criteria should include dimensions of cohesion, learning and integration.
“All of these aspects need to be managed for effectiveness, on an ongoing basis. Throwing a group of people together with some objectives, and hoping that they will turn into a high performance team is just not good enough!”
Read the full article here.
Adjunct Assistant Professor Chung Yuen Kay was formerly a Senior Vice-President, Head of Learning and Development, Citigroup Private Bank, Asia-Pacific, in 2006 and 2007. Prior to that she was a lecturer, then Head, of the HRM (Teaching) Unit at NUS Business School. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the NUS Business School’s Department of Management and Organization, as well as an independent researcher/trainer/consultant. She has consulted/trained for organizations in the public and private sectors, locally and internationally, and has also actively researched and published. |