Skip to main content

Effective teams - Week four blog post


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.



Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 29, 2019 at 8:00 AM

    Could you clarify whether the group goals were imposed from above or defined by the group itself? That would be helpful.

    It 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.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alice RivlinSeptember 30, 2019 at 8:39 PM

      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.

      There 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.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gift exchange - opportunism

The ideas and theories in the three articles are intriguing. It is not surprising for me when I read some of the theories, such as those of the first and second article. People are more likely to share what they have with people who are in poorer conditions when they know that both parties are collaborating in, or putting effort into, the same goal. It is rarely the case that fairness exists. The rare existence of fairness does not necessarily mean there’s nothing we can do to equalize (or balance) all the parties. There are strategies alleviate the sense of unfairness. “I cut, you pick” and “tit for tat” work not only for children but also work for adults in teams or organizations. As long as both or multiple parties are making similarly equal amount of dedication or sacrifice, people won’t complain about the unfairness. The third article surprised me in that I always think people make choices and decisions for their own benefit. However, in fact, people do not make decision...
2 comments
Read more

last blog post :)

Throughout the semester of learning and discussing economic concepts and models related to organizations, I had a better understanding of the structures, managing styles, and the reward and punishment system with respect to organizations in general. These concepts and knowledge indeed exist in our daily life, but I had never gotten the opportunity like this course to get to know the linkage between the abstract (overall) economic models and real life. For instance, in the gift exchange model, we are expecting two parties, such as the instructor and the students, to exchange reciprocal benefits with each other. This model can be applied to other circumstances as well, such as organizations. The employees complete tasks and bring profit to the organization, while the employer pays the employees by salaries as a reciprocity. Exchange occurs, so that everyone is getting something as making a contribution. To be more specific, connecting this model with my experiences, I now realize what I ...
3 comments
Read more

discipline and punishment

Retrospect to the blog post assignment last week, the concept of sharing the marbles was introduced and discussed. It was basically saying that people are more willing to share their possessions with people in the middle of poorer situations when both parties are contributing efforts to the common project or goal. If the distribution of resources is allocated randomly, with no collaboration requiring or existing in the situation, sharing is less likely, if by any chance, happening. Bringing the same topic to a different level, this week, we are going to discuss whether the division of the reward based on the performance will actually improve the performance in the future, or on the contrary, do harm to the relationship among the team members. When making decisions and considerations in groups, the judgment is no longer based merely on the fairness of reward allocation. In fact, all the rewards and penalties are aiming at improving the performance and production in the future. I was ...
2 comments
Read more