Thank you all for your responses (both on the net and off) to my remarks
about teams. It is really exciting to find that so many people, in and
out of the university, are wrestling with the same issues as I do daily.
Teaching, indeed thinking about, teams is challenging intellectually as
well as in practice.
In regards to Bill Ferris's reply, I understand you to say that you have
two subsequent semester courses (one specifically in team leadership and
the next in OB) that students take simultaneously with other content
courses. I think that we are not far off in our understanding of what is
required to help these student teams be effective. You are providing the
facilitation and coaching skills for the teams through the team course and
the OB course and you are doing it while students are engaging in teams in
their other content courses over a 2 semester period. This sounds ideal,
and your weekend MBA schedule permits this. We have a classic part-time
MBA as well as undergrad schedule here serving a commuter population, and
do not have that much control over course sequencing. I teach a full
semester course at both levels in which I teach teaming fundamentals and I
facilitate the development of teaming skills. My experience is that
students then go off to other content courses in which the professors know
little (and care less) about teaming -- they put students in groups on
projects that do not require a group to begin with, they fail to provide
for peer assessment, and when student seek their council with team
problems, they tell them that it is their problem and that they don't want
to hear about it. I recently had students tell me about a course where
the prof. assigned them to groups by name in day 1 with a project due on
day 16 (we meet once a week for 16 weeks here), and that was the
instructors contribution to their teaming efforts. THis is a recipe for
failure, whether the team is in industry or in the university. Teams in
industry who are in a context that prevents adequate identity development
have weaker performance. What I am suggesting here is that, in my
experience with team use in the classroom, just as in industry, the
problem with teams is as often the organizational context as it is the
team members. For a great book on this topic see Donnellon's 1996
TeamTalk. I also published a paper in June 1997 in The Journal of
Engineering and Technology Management on the topic of team social
identification in project development teams. Bill, it sounds to me as if
Western New England College has developed a culture that supports
teamwork.
In response to Glenn's comments, this is exactly what this entire
discussion is really about. You are right, most "teams" in the university
are "groups". The way I distinguish between them (and we should remember
that team-ness or group-ness exists on a continuum) is that teams take
ownership of their processes and outcomes and the members are mutually
acountable for both. In contrast, groups take minimal ownership because
the process and outcomes are really viewed as individual contributions
with a cut and paste job at the end. I would suggest the problem is
twofold in using groups in the classroom: (1) the tasks that students
are given seldom are broad enough to require a team effort - individual
students could accomplish the task more efficiently and effectively all by
themselves. Part of this is breath, part of it is in the nature of the
task itself. I am still wrestling with what is an appropriate team
task - for me, tasks that promote team ownership are those that
require multiple skill-sets for accomplishment, that there is not one
right answer, or one in which the products among different teams can
look radically different and yet all be "right", and a product that
allows the team to put their own idiosyncratic stamp or identity on it.
This suggests a creative product of some sort, and, in fact, I have
seen teams used most successfully outside of OB or team classes in a
course that we have here on marketing promotion; (2) the
classroom situation is seldom designed to promote joint ownership of the
team by the team members. Peer evaluations are good, but again, I would
strongly recommend having the team develop their own criteris, I have
found no quicker way to make it clear that I don't own this team - they
do. The other thing that I have found critical to building "teamship"
quickly is to provide an immediate assignment that is due very soon after
the team is formed. This forces an intial task-related interaction among
the members, I've found that getting started is one of the team's most
difficult tasks. I have chosen a deliberately ambiguous task - developing
the team's fantasy - which is due to be presented to the class on the
third meeting in a 12 minute timeframe. They get no further instruction
from me than that. (I did not develop this idea - someone, I'm sorry I
can't remember who) had a paper on it in the Journal of Management
Education). The idea here is to give them an assignment that is ambiguous
but forces them to utilize the talents, skills etc. available in the team.
In strategy, it might have something to do with presenting a strategic
plan for the college or university. It doesn't matter that they don't
know much this early in the semester, what matters it that they have to
pool and use what they do know within the team, and get up in front of the
class presenting themselve as a team early on. Hope this helps in your
thinking.
In regards to Robert Bacal, Bill and others, I do think that there are
strong differences between teams in classrooms and teams in the real
world, but, like a true management professor, I also think that there are
strong similarities. However, I got tired of debating this as an
intellectual exercise and use it as a learning tool (for me and my
students in the classroom). We explore this in a number of ways - through
discussion in class, but most usefully through the group project. My
project requires 4 or 5 students (no more or no less) to identify a real
world team, study and
diagnose their processes and effectiveness through the course of the
semester, and compare and contrast their real world team to their in-class
team on multiple dimensions. This has been a fabulous learning
experience. My students have studied the Colorado Springs Smphony
Orchestra, the local air traffic controllers, the birthing unit staff at a
local hospital, a virtual engineering team at Ford Micro-Electronic, the
national help desk team at MCI, the SWAT team at the local police
department, accounting team at the Fianacial Services Center of
Hewlett-Packard, and the hard-wood floor laying team at a local flooring
company
to name only a few. Students learn the material by using it to critique a
real team in operation, and they are inspired by the effectiveness of some
teams and horrified by the dysfunction of others. The students must
prepare recommendations for the real world team's improved preformance
and present it to them, and the students are always amazed that many of
the real world teams usually want the feedback, and place high value on
it.
I disagree with you Robert, that my student teams lack a mission compared
to those in the real world - my experiences in industry with project
development teams suggests that they view their missions much as my
students do. Also, although I have students who view the exercise to be
of no significance or only of value in terms of a grade (most of them when
the course starts), it is pretty clear from the feedback that I get and
from their final reflection papers, that, by the end of the course,
through the team experience, approximately 70% of them view this learning
experience to have profound significance to their future careers as well
as as to their personal development.
Finally, for John Sullivan, teaching them to work in teams is difficult
and takes a hugh commitment on the part of the college as well as on the
professor who happens to be teaching the team course. I think that my
efforts in this one semester course are valuable and help students develop
a foundational understanding of good team practive (agenda, meeting notes,
peer evals, statements of norms, etc.) as well as to begin to assess and
develop their interpersonal teaming skills. However, I think that it
would be far more valuable if we could leverage this by having these
skills further developed in other courses throughout their college years.
Susanne G. Scott
Assistant Professor of Management and Organization
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway
Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150
719-262-3579
FAX: 719-590-1543
email:
sscott@mail.uccs.edu