Eyes on the A-team

AUTHOR: Deborah Tarrant   DATE: 06.09.07   ISSUE 1, 2007

The success of most service organisations – large and small – operating in today’s highly competitive business environment invariably involves teamwork. Employees are increasingly reliant on each other to reach their performance goals.

There’s wide recognition that teams can achieve far more than individuals who are working solo. Their approaches are more flexible and responsive. They are able to complete tasks more quickly and at a higher quality and to deliver greater customer satisfaction.

As teams are growing in their influence, we need to learn more about how they operate.

Illustration: Danny Snell

More than half of today’s workforce is engaged in teamwork, and research has shown that profits in centres using collaborative team structures far outstrip – by more than 10 percent – those operating with traditional leader and subordinate employee structures.

Yet little is known about what really makes a team tick. Why does one team hit its target, while another with similar resources and expectations flails?

A study of team efficacy by Australian School of Business marketing lecturer Dr Tania Bucic and PhD student Linda Robinson is currently exploring the interdependencies at work in service organisation teams.

Their research aims to provide evidence of what impacts on team performance and to produce guidelines for managers on how to improve team effectiveness.

“As teams are growing in their influence, we need to learn more about how they operate,” says Dr Bucic who believes the new research will be of particular relevance to the rapidly growing call centre industry, banks and financial institutions, and other large customer-focused businesses.

Teams may be proliferating, but a lot of managers are simply putting together groups of people and not working on the team environment.

“A team is not simply a group of individuals, but a unique entity with interdependencies, and managers need to understand a team’s structure to be able to control and develop it,” she says.

“Some people work better in teams than others. Managers need to know how to manage the team to perform more efficiently, not by working harder but by discovering shortcuts, perhaps taking risks and working smarter, so they can free up time to achieve more.”

Research on team performance to date has mainly focused on variables such as resourcing, skills and training, but little is understood about how teams are formed and how members interact over the long term. “We’re studying teams that have a history and a future because short-lived teams tend not to form identities,” explains Ms Robinson.

The researchers define team efficacy in four components: Team task performance – How teams interpret past performance; what has been learned and how is that applied to future tasks. Team vicarious experience – Winners or losers, teams learn from seeing another team’s performance, so how does that affect them? Team motivation – In a collaborative structure, how do relationships work with managers and within the team itself? How is knowledge shared, and how are the team members encouraged, supported and given feedback towards promoting success? Team psychological safety – Do team members feel safe to put forward ideas? Is the environment conducive to risk-taking?

This study is a first using these control variables to explore business organisations. Part of the project will also explore the goal orientation of teams. The new model was first presented at the Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference in 2006.

The research project, conducted principally in a large travel company that has been operating successfully in a multi-layered team environment, is running in two stages. Managers are being interviewed, and the working of 100 teams is being examined through responses to written surveys from several members of each team.

By identifying what forms their efficacy beliefs – what makes teams believe they can perform better and makes them more responsive, dynamic and fluid – we can help them further develop those beliefs, Ms Robinson concludes.