MANAGING AND LEADING A TEAM AT MARKS AND SPENCER

Managing and Leading a Team at Marks and Spencer

Managing and Leading a Team at Marks and Spencer

Introduction

Successfully management and leading of a team result in positive performance of overall team members. Team performance may be described as a team's collective strategies that aim at the accomplishment of the team's tasks. Models of team effectiveness thereby demarcate team performance strategies from team effectiveness, the latter being the outcomes of team performance strategies (Kerr and Tindale, 2004). In order to understand thoroughly team performance and effectiveness, researchers have developed models outlining predictors, team processes, contextual influences, and team outcomes in the form of input-process-outcome frameworks. This paper discusses managing and leading a team at Marks and Spencer in a concise and comprehensive way.

Managing and Leading a Team at Marks and Spencer

Before we talk about team performance, we need to define what we mean by “team.” In this entry, we will focus on bona fide organizational teams that perform tasks within an organizational context, as opposed to other work forms such as ad hoc student teams compiled for research purposes. Hackman outlined in 2002 that such teams have certain features that characterize them as “real teams.”

First, they have clear boundaries that clearly demarcate them from other work units within an organization. Team membership is clear, and everyone knows who is and isn't on the team. Second, they are stable over time, which means that there are few membership changes in the team (Kerr and Tindale, 2004). Third, generating the outcome or product of the team requires a great deal of communication and coordination among members—thus, team members work interdependently together. Finally, beyond actually carrying out their work, team members have varying degrees of authority over their work. This may include monitoring of the team's work, but might also extend to selecting new team members or asking existing members to leave.

Input-Process-Output Models of Team Performance Effectiveness

At Marks and Spencer the dominant thinking about team performance has been guided by so-called “input-process-outcome” models of team effectiveness (see Figure 1). Such models distinguish the basic building blocks for the team, i.e., the inputs (e.g., composition of team members) from the processes (e.g., team members' collective knowledge and skills) and team outputs (e.g., team performance outcome). Even though researchers have disagreed on the exact contents of each of the three categories, using such a model bears great heuristic value as it allows us to both understand and structure the key predictors and outcomes of team performance.

In the following paragraphs, we will integrate factors of each of the model's components, starting with team outcomes at at Marks and Spencer. Many researchers and practitioners refer to team performance as a wide variety of indicators present, such as the quantity of output produced by a manufacturing team. Hackman (2002) stresses that such criteria are frequently insufficient in addressing other relevant outcome dimensions, such as customers' assessments of a team's work or social and personal criteria of team ...