There
are various team configurations being discussed in B&D: one boss, dual
authority, Simple hierarchy, circle network, and all-channel network. One boss,
by the definition, is that all individuals in the team follow the one and only
leader in the team. The leader holds all the control and authority in his/her
hand. Dual authority means the team divided into two sub-groups with a sub-leader
who can supervise the group members and report everything to the leader. In
this case, the leader only directly contacts with the two sub-leaders. Simple
hierarchy has the same number of divisions in the group, whereas only one
sub-leader communicating between the members and the boss on the top of the
structure, supervising all the members, and sending feedback to the boss.
Circle network means there is no leader necessarily existing in the structure
and members all connect to some of the others in the group. The problem with
such a team structure is that it takes a longer time with lower efficiency of
communication. Decision making under such structure is also slow, since no one
has authority over others. Members have a hard time figuring out whose idea to
listen or follow. All-channel network is like an updated version of circle
network but with more sophisticated links among members.
I’ve
been part of a successful team before, the intern team I used to be in
throughout last summer. The team originally was a one-boss structure with low
efficiency because our boss was super busy and had no time to assign tasks to
each of us. We, the interns, were unable to get tasks done on time because our
questions and confusions were not solved and answered by professionals on time.
Our boss finally decided to make a change, turned our one-boss structure into a
dual authority team structure. In this way, she no more had to keep an eye on
every team member, especially the interns. She assigned two of her PhD students
to be the sub-leaders of the whole team and divided all the interns into two
groups. After the switch of team structure, she only had to meet with the two
sub-leaders weekly to see if task allocation and management were going ok with
the two groups. The two sub-leaders communicated with us better since they had
more free time than our boss. We reported questions we encountered to them
right away to improve the efficiency. As a result, we met our group goals every
week since then.
According
to Katzenbach
and Smith, a high-performing team is able to translate general big goals into
small segments for members to finish. Its members have a mutual passion of
getting work done nicely and quickly. Also, the team size has to be manageable,
meaning not too many members nor too less. With respect to our team, we qualified
those features well. There were less than ten people in each group and both of
our sub-leaders were able to assign the large overall task into small segments
for interns to complete. Although interns did not know how to get some of the tasks
done initially, we shared a strong belief that all the questions that we were
going to face will going to be solved with our efforts.
Could you clarify whether the group goals were imposed from above or defined by the group itself? That would be helpful.
ReplyDeleteIt would also be helpful to know whether at the end of the summer there was some sort of review of the group performance and if at that review the general conclusion was that the new structure worked better.
The part of your story I'm not understanding is what the PhD students were doing earlier. Were they simply busy with other work that didn't involve the interns? If so, I would think that the right way to evaluate the new arrangement would be to not just focus on the work the interns did, but also focus on the other work the PhD students did. If that other worked didn't suffer much, then overall this would be a success. So what I'm suggesting here is to try to cast this not just from the perspective of the interns, but also from the prospective of the boss and the PhD students. Maybe you don't know these things, but then you might speculate about them. It would make your essay richer.
All the goals were set by our boss, the dean. She was the head manager to our research groups. Before applied dual authority team structure, we were under one-boss structure. She was always busy that she never had time to communicate her goals and expectations clearly in details, so we always have hard time finish tasks on time. Or, we finished it with tons of effort but did not meet her standard. I get it that talking to everyone of us weekly was impossible, after all we were a large group. Things changed after the two PhD students became the sub-leaders for the two groups of intern. In this way, our boss, the dean, only had to talk to them weekly. Instead of throwing big chunks of tasks directly to us, she communicated with the two PhD students and they digested and divided tasks into small tasks to us, the interns.
DeleteThere was no evaluation of our job performance before and after the change of team structure, so no direct "evidence". However, we can still perceive the change. We spent less time doing tasks every week since the transformation but with more papers and cases being viewed and discussed. We also felt that we were moving forward, comparing to "didn't know where we were heading" before the transformation.