LEADING TEAMS

Leading Teams

Leading Teams

Introduction

This log book explores the concept of leading teams in a holistic context. Team leadership reflects a process by which one or more individual's direct, structure, and facilitate the collective efforts of team members to achieve team effectiveness. Team effectiveness is characterized by the quantity, quality, and timeliness of the team's work output (i.e., product, service, decision), the enhancement of members' capability to work together independently in the future, and the learning and personal well-being of individual team members (Hackman, 2009: pp. 315-342). It is the role, therefore, of the team leader(s) to create conditions and act in a way that advances the teams' productive output; the viability of the team as a whole; and the knowledge, skills, and other relevant attributes of the individual members. The reason for this log book is to explain the features of managing teams at Morrison Supermarket, UK. Work teams as increasingly popular organizational structures serve to improve quality, increase efficiency, and ensure organizational sustainability(Latham, 2009:pp. 485-516). Effectiveness in group functioning depends to a large extent on the strength of the relationships within the team (such as trust in team members), which, in turn, nourish the nature of their internal interactions. Additionally, this log book evaluates the strategies adopted by the management in order to create effective teams. Given the growing importance of work teams in today's organizations, there exists considerable interest in designing, selecting, training, and leading teams to be effective. However, this is also an area in which practice has significantly outpaced research, leading to interventions being developed in the absence of a solid scientific foundation. In a recent 2006 article, Kozlowski and Ilgen identified those areas of the team effectiveness literature that have well-developed theoretical and empirical foundations and used the findings from these areas to identify interventions that can improve team effectiveness (Kerr, 2009: pp. 623-655). Finally, this logbook identifies the aspects of managing individuals and provides strategies to achieve their respective stated goals and objectives.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Organisation to Manage Individuals

When organizations specialize and diversify their workforce and adopt team-based structures, management faces the problem of how to bundle and integrate individual team efforts in order to maximize organizational effectiveness. Lawrence and Lorsch, back in 1967, conducted a seminal research project in which they illustrated that integration of these “parts” into a “whole” can represent a major problem for team-based organizations. Kramer in 1991 suggested that managers need to consider both structural and psychological barriers that exist between groups and that hamper organizational effectiveness. Groups pursue their own interests at the expense of the overall organizational goal, they compete over scarce resources, and they fail to manage the disruptive dynamics of social categorization, developing “subcultures” and strong “group identities,” which can result in poor intergroup working. Some research suggests that managers could employ at least two strategies to overcome intergroup struggles for organizational effectiveness (Hackman, 2010: pp. 89-96). First, they need to manage interdependencies between groups in such a way that ...