The Self in Teams

The Self in Teams Groups that range from two persons to many are a very big part of social life—in all its facets—and most organizations rely on teamwork: the justification is that teams are better at solving problems and learn more rapidly and with more effect than individuals (Serrat, 2009). This précis offers reflections on personal experiences of teamwork, noting what does not work.

The précis identifies a meaningful common purpose as the single highest requirement for getting work done but underscores other key ingredients of practice. The précis also notes the importance of integrating team identity for team effectiveness.

Olivier Serrat 09/09/2019

1 On Teams: What's in a Word?

"In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history, and then people continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should know better," reflected de Bono, cited in Sears (2007, p. 8). What's in a word like "team", for example? "When we think about a great team, the image we conjure up almost always includes a great leader," Hackman declared in Hickman (2010). And yet, despite the myriad of interpretations, we are still far from fully understanding how teams—as distinct from groups— can with or without leadership be made to click.

Apropos teams, specifically, much of the problem owes to familiarity, which as the expression goes breeds contempt and, in this case, thoughtless association with groups. It helps, therefore, that Katzenbach and Smith (1993) made out teams from other forms of working groups: their distinction turning on performance results and theirs is a vision of "real teams that perform, not amorphous groups that we call teams because we think that the label is motivating and energizing" (p. 111). And so, "A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable" (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993, p. 112). For fear that it might pass unnoticed, one should point out also that Katzenbach and Smith's (1993) definition brought to both mind and heart five essential ingredients of practice: (a) "a meaningful common purpose that the team has helped shaped"; (b) "specific performance goals that flow from the common purpose"; (c) "a mix of complementary skills"; (d) "a strong commitment to how the work gets done"; and (e) "mutual accountability", an exacting but nonetheless practicable definition that summoned more than Hackman's (2010) straightforward call for leaders to "stack the deck" in the right order with "a compelling direction, an enabling structure, and a supporting context" (Katzenbach & Smith, 2011, pp. 178–179; Hackman, 2010, p. 212). The order is undoubtedly tall but, with the essentials ingredients of practice at hand, a team can then concentrate on the business for which it has been purposefully assembled, namely, the collective work product, be that to make recommendations (in which case the critical challenge is to make a quick and fecund start before handing off), make or do things (in which case the critical challenge is to bear specific performance goals in mind), or run things (in which case the critical challenge is to distinguish what requires a team approach from what does not) (Katzenbach & Smith, 2011, p. 179). This does not mean there is no role for leadership in teams but, per Yukl (2013), the determinants of team performance have—first and foremost and elaborating on Katzenbach and Smith (1993)—to do with "commitment to task objectives and strategies[;] member skills and role clarity[;] internal organization and coordination[;] external coordination[;] resources and political support[;] mutual trust, cohesiveness, and cooperation[;] collective efficacy and potency[;] accurate, shared mental models[;] collective learning[;] and member diversity (Yukl, 2013, p. 255): with variations depending on the type of team, e.g., functional, cross-functional, self-managed, or virtual, what scope there is leadership has to do with influencing—hard enough as that may be—but can never supplant or even make up for the essential ingredients of practice. Incongruously, individual or shared leadership may actually be more necessary where a team does not come together, thus connoting that something is not quite right.

On Self: What's in a Word?

And what of the word "self"? Springing from self-awareness, self-control, self-esteem, selfknowledge, and self-perception, the self is higher-level cognition that helped address the question: "Who am I?"; identity is more specific and relates to particular aspects of the self, meaning, the beliefs, expressions, looks, personality, qualities, etc. that make a person (or a

2 social group). Helpfully, from the perspective of organization development (and so teams), Markus and Wurf (1987), cited in Hultman and Hultman (2015), see that identity includes "a sense of personal identity across time and space[;] an awareness of personal abilities[;] acknowledging certain characteristics as being self-designing[;] accepting specific roles and responsibilities[;] being committed to a set of values, beliefs, and goals[;] and holding a life-view that provides a sense of meaning and purpose" (p. 40). Paraphrasing John Donne, since no man (or woman) is an island, entire of itself, it follows that both self and identity have to do with relationships, with the personal self (e.g., unique traits) nesting inside a relational self (e.g., family, friends, colleagues), itself nesting inside a collective self (e.g., group memberships) per Brewer and Gardner (1996).

Developing a personal self apart from relational and collective selves cannot be easily envisaged, at least not without inward or outward struggle or conflict; not to forget, with no denigration of the benefits of diversity, integrating individual and organizational identity can help build effective and healthy work environments, especially in teams. Helpfully, from the perspective of integrating team identity for team effectiveness, Hultman and Hultman (2015) identified processes (i.e., leadership, communication, coordination, conflict resolution, and learning) as well as cognitive (i.e., climate, shared mental models, and transactive memory) and affective/motivational (i.e., psychological safety, cohesion, team efficacy, and potency) factors that are associated with team effectiveness and so should be promoted (p. 46).

The Self in Teams When the teams I was a member of (or led) were infused by Katzenbach and Smith's (1993) essential ingredients of practice, my experience of teamwork wholeheartedly confirmed the validity of the determinants of team performance that Yukl (2013) identified: these teams generated astonishing results by reason of common goal, commitment, and competence, with uncommon integration of individual and organizational identities and ongoing clarification of answers to the question "Who are we?" by interrogating the interrelationships between the selves and their teams. (To note, what with globalization and the rise of virtual teaming, it may become more difficult to forge and continuously reinforce social identity in the face of increasingly transient personal, relational, and collective contexts.) In such instances, neither I nor my other team members ever felt the need to take over because someone might not deliver his/her share, let alone sat back to let others step in, or waited until the last minute before taking any sort of action.

Box 1: A Team That Clicked John once had 10 days to conduct, with the help of a consultant selected for his skills, the midterm review mission of a multimillion-dollar land resource evaluation and planning project covering 18 provinces of ***. (Midterm reviews address all the institutional, administrative, organizational, technical, environmental, social, economic, and financial aspects of a project.)

All parameters being set with detailed terms of reference establishing direction, urgency, and performance standards (but the consultant—David—being new to John and to that particular job), there remained only interpersonal processes to work on. Time being of the essence, John proposed that David and he should sit side-by-side and work on one laptop computer in quick conversations across multiple files and applications: the results of that symbiotic "braintrust" were extraordinary. Teaming in complete harmony in a modus operandi of their own device, all the impediments that Schein (1999) associated with interpersonal processes never eventuated: John and David delivered in the time allotted, which also involved three long flights and associated field trips across a vast country, a report of +120 (single-space) pages.

3 On leaving, David confessed he had never worked so hard in his life but that he had never had so much fun either. John and David's particularized approach to interpersonal processes proved so efficient and effective that they continued to work in the same way on numerous projects for many years thereafter.

Note. Names and other identifying details have been changed.

That said, even though a team is not necessarily the best organizational structure for what an organization sets out to accomplish, teams are often put together for no other reason than political correctness, or because no one can think of other organizational arrangements: and so, teaming recurrently becomes a rite of passage and, wastefully, little else. In truth, what (admittedly challenging) problems are universally associated with teaming would not be half so difficult if, in the first place, the rationale for their formation was made clear from the beginning: this is something most organizations, textbooks, and models only pay lip service to. Tuckman's (1965) model of group development, for example, specified forming–storming–norming– performing stages: reasonably, one might expect that the rationale for forming would be addressed from the onset; but, at the first stage of forming, Tuckman (1965) showed exclusive concern for anxiety, roles, responsibilities, and the need for members to get to know each other, not with the raison d'être, the motivation, behind the proposed association. Little wonder, then, that here, there, and everywhere, teams tend to cluster at opposite ends of the performance continuum: people love them or—much more frequently—hate them. Lencioni (2002) put his finger on the pulse when he listed the dysfunctions that the failure to build a cohesive team engenders as absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results: for sure, these pitfalls are what anyone involved in group and team leadership would want to concentrate on avoiding or remedying and so develop proficiency toward. And yet, just like Tuckman (1965), Lencioni (2002) paid no attention to raison d'être.

Box 2: A Team That Failed Not long ago, senior staff of an organization that John was working for mooted the idea of an action plan to ramp up operations in information and communication technology. John and two others were nominated to help but things went awry from the outset: group boundary management, group task accomplishment, and interpersonal and group management proved impossible. The formation of the team having been suggested, not decided, with a spur-ofthe-moment sign-off but no genuine commitment at higher-levels in John's department, the team immediately fell prey to organizational politics. Because the boundaries of the assignment were neither the group's nor anybody else's, John's two colleagues felt under no compulsion to work hard just so some (unknown) party might eventually take the credit (if there was appetite for that). Competence—meaning, technical expertise and problem-solving skills—the team assuredly had; but, commitment to a vague goal it did not. John drafted the plan without help: interdepartmental consultations at junior levels elicited all-round praise but the plan could not secure endorsement at senior levels and so was not acted upon.

Note. Names and other identifying details have been changed.

4 References Brewer, M., & Gardner, W. (1996). Who is this "we"? Levels of collective identity and self representations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(1), 83–93.

Hackman, J. (2010). Leading teams: Imperatives for leaders. In G. Hickman (Ed.). Leading organizations: Perspectives for a new era (pp.209–238). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Hultman, K., & Hultman, J. (2015). Organizational development as identity change. Organization Development Journal, 33(3), 39–54.

Katzenbach, J., & Smith, D. (1993). The discipline of teams. Harvard Business Review, 71(2): 111–120.

Katzenbach, J., & Smith, D. (2011). The discipline of teams. In HBR's 10 Must Reads: On Managing People (pp. 175–194). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Sears, W. (2007). The frontline guide to thinking clearly. Amherst, MA. HRD Press, Inc. Schein, E. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. San Francisco, CA: Addison-Wesley.

Serrat, O. (2009). Working in teams. Manila: Asian Development Bank.

Tuckman, B. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399.