Monday, March 30, 2009

WHY TEAMS FAIL

Abstract

Lots of resources and money are spent on team development, team efforts and still teams sometimes fail to deliver. Team failure and team frustration is a fact of life and cannot be ignored in an organization. With globalization, team structures are changing. Many organizations focus their training efforts on communication and interpersonal dynamics and forget the basics of team performance. Lot of Research has been done in this area of team failure over the years. In this paper, we are examining the issue from the perspective of students with moderate working experience/knowledge in different professions.

Objective of this paper, to the best of the author’s abilities and understandings, is to approach some of the reasons why do teams fail. Is it the lack of leadership? Is it the unresolved conflict? How about the lack of trust? Are culture and/or environment possible contributors? Definitely there are many other factors that may lead to unsatisfactory unsuccessful ending for a team, but what really interested our team are five areas described in this paper.
Introduction

Teams are put together to combine the knowledge and expertise of their members. The team members are all successful individuals with extensive experience in their field. So why do teams fail to perform as expected? Are the individual members to be blamed? Or is it the failure of the group as a whole?

We, Team 1 of the “Communications and Team-building” class of ETM department at PSU have tried to examine and answer this question. Our preliminary research pointed us to five main underlying causes – Lack of trust, Destructive Conflict, Incompetent Leadership, Cultural differences and Environmental factors. These factors are some of the most common problems faced by teams, but each team confronts different circumstances and goes through diverse experiences. We are discussing here some of the variables affecting team performance which if ignored can lead to a team’s failure.
Literature Review

There are intensive research works done in the field of Team Building. Building a team is a single most important thing a team leader can do for a successful team. [Speelman, Ralph J]. Leaders should not think of themselves as managers but as “Team Leaders” [Warren Bennis, Ph.D.] Thinking as managers when will only reduce the participation of team members which is needed to avoid failure. Most research literatures float around vocabulary like focus shared; effective communication; a sense of responsibility and empowerment; leadership; and trust to be some of the causes of teams' failures. The research stressed the important of trust and all other components are followed.[DeMarco, 2001] . The independency of team members is what makes team to be a team. The readings also suggest that all other components are depending on trust but at the same time components can impact trust.


Research Analysis


In the main section below, we discuss the 5 variables of team performance and how they can lead to team failures when not followed and implemented properly.


VARIABLES AFFECTING TEAM PERFORMANCE

1 Lack of Trust

Trust has been defined by various authors as: “The willingness to be vulnerable”[1], “willingness to rely on another”[2], “intention to accept vulnerability”[3] , “positive expectations about others”[4] All these definitions converge to give a general sense of vulnerability of individual behavior to other people’s expectation of their response.
Trust is a vital part of all relationships - even in the workplace. It takes time to develop but is easy to lose and hard to regain. In today’s workplace, with constant layoffs, downsizing, restructuring and mergers and acquisitions taking place, trust among co-workers is at its lowest ever.

Below, we give an example of a sports team to illustrate our point.

The 2004 U.S. Olympic basketball team consisted entirely of NBA stars; It was the best ever basketball team from US to represent in Olympics. Still, it finished third and lost to Lithuania. So what was the main reason?

Although the team was formed of the best players, it did not have much time to form a relation among the players. Team needed to develop continuity and team chemistry. They needed to form the initial trust and understanding – which was missing. That trust can only be formed over a period of time and not overnight. Lack of Trust, Communication and understanding lead to Team’s failure.

Trust is a critical element of teams. In its absence, a team falls through like a pack of cards. Lack of trust in teams makes its members vulnerable. They fear conflict as they don’t know other member’s responses to the conflict. This leads to “artificial harmony” [5] where there is absolute agreement with every idea. It shows that the team’s members are not committed to making the team’s decisions a success. All members avoid being held accountable for their actions which results in ambiguity and mediocre results.

But how do we develop trust? One key element in developing trust is “familiarity” [6]. As team members become more familiar with each other, they change their expectations about each other. It has been shown that selecting members who have worked together in successful projects before and are familiar with each other leads to more trust among the members. The fundamental barriers to developing trust in teams are “differences” in personality, culture, language, jargon, responsibilities or physical barriers. People from different backgrounds are generally viewed as “Unknown” and it takes time to develop trust in someone you don’t know. Also, it is difficult to immediately trust someone you have not met face-to-face as happens with virtual teams.

Now in the next section, we will examine how lack of trust leads to conflict situations and hamper team performance
2 How Conflicts affect Teams’ Performance

"Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheep like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving “Conflict is a form of interaction among parties that differ in interest, perceptions, and preferences.” [7]

When a group of individuals with varying experiences, thought processes and expectations work together as a team, conflict is inevitable. Conflict can be of different types. For our Research Paper – we are analyzing destructive and emotional conflict which leads to Team Failures.

Emotional conflict is "personal, defensive, and resentful" and of is based on anger, personality clashes, ego and tension. Emotional conflict occurs when individual interests trump the interests of the team as a whole. This type of conflict interferes with the effort of a team to resolve a problem. Destructive conflict, like emotional conflict, causes dysfunction when a "lack of common agreement leads to negativism" (Thompson, Aranda, and Robbins, 2000). This disrupts the progress of all group members. Destructive conflict in teams diminishes the possibility of any problem resolution. Understanding and defining conflict terminology and conflict management is a first and important step in successful conflict management. Since conflict is inevitable in any team or group situation.

We will discuss these two types of conflicts with an example from the workplace of one of our team members.

One of our team member, called TM1 – in the paper, works in the Support Team of an IT Organization. This Support team consists of 8 engineers – each supporting couple of servers. For support work, customers engage with these engineers thru a ticket system. When customers raise a ticket in the queue, every engineer is supposed to pick up their tickets – but sometimes some tickets remain open in the queue for a long duration. It’s because every engineer tries to pick only their own tickets. Due to lack of trust – they do not bother about some overlapping tickets. Also, because of interpersonal conflicts, engineers do not pick the tickets of the engineer on vacation. Manager introduced the idea of a single engineer assigning tickets on a weekly basis – but nobody agreed. Everybody had their own ideas on how to handle tickets. This lack of trust and interpersonal conflict on how to handle tickets is affecting the Service Level Agreements with the customer.

Also the team leadership is not able to resolve this situation to everybody’s satisfaction – affecting team performance. In the next section, we do talk about how team leaders can make/break a team.

3 How Poor Leadership impacts Team Performance

Leadership is critical for good team performance. But still when leaders do not assign Roles and Responsibilities in a team clearly, conflict arises and employees get stressed due to a large share of work. Without proper guidance from the team leaders, team members will resort to their own methods. Some will run as far and fast as they can and take on too much risk. Others will sit idle for as long as they can, performing as little as possible. Some leaders are too busy concentrating on their own political or career agenda. Other leaders just don’t understand their role or possess good leadership skills.

Lee Iacocca has been one of the great business leaders in the US automotive industry and he was instrumental in turning around the Chrysler Car Company in the late 80’s. In his latest book “Where have all the leaders gone” [8], he talks about 9 qualities of a Leader – lack of which leads to dismal team performance. These are Charisma, Creative, Conviction, Character, Courage, Competency, Curiosity, and Communication & Common Sense. As per Lee, current state of affairs in the world needs solid leaders with at least some of these qualities.

Team members look to leaders as their role model. If a leader is not charismatic, courageous and competent, team members lose faith in the capabilities of the team and fail to focus on team goals. In the text book Wisdom of Teams Chapter 7 “Team Leaders”, teams fail due to the following actions of leadership [9]:
- Leader does not help to remove barriers to team performance.
- Team leader does not believe in the team’s goals/purpose.
- Team lead is not energetic enough to build commitment and confidence.
- Team leader fails to communicate team goals & achievements to outsiders.
- Team leader is not able to strike a balance between authority and delegation. He does not loosen the control – if required.
- If the team leader does not step in when dirty work is required or when the team is in trouble, then employees will not trust him/her.
Team leaders are the mentors for their teams and teams look to the leaders for direction. In the Book “Who Says Elephants can’t dance” - Luis Gerstener explains how he built his management team in IBM and turned the most complex and big company back to a profitable position. He says that building a management team is something you have to do business by business, people by people, day by day.
It’s OK to have mutual accountability. But at the same time, leaders need to be blunt and decisive in order to get the desired performance from the teams. This is exactly what is missing in the Team Leader of the case mentioned in the above section for TM1.
We talked about 9C’s for leadership – but there is one very important C (for Culture) which can negatively impact team performance and is discussed in the next section.
4 Culture and its effect on Teams

Culture is defined in different ways; 1- “an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning”, and 2- “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.”[10] In other words, culture rules people behaviors.

In the course of history, human has established different groups and communities based on the environmental and geographical effects. As human interacted with each other and crossed borders, the interaction of the different cultures met critical challenges. In some occasions these values encountered similar or common ground with the new environment and an established coexistence was formed to absorb the new ideas and habits. In other cases when these values met with a strong resistance to being formed or connect with the new environment, the problem started to emerge and a new challenge was created.

Coming to the team environment, that same culture difference can be easily brought into the team structure. Therefore, a team formed for a specific task can face a critical point that endangers its existence if the cultural difference is not utilized for its benefits, and the unsuccessful management of the difference will cause the team to fail.

A simple example of the cultural difference negative effect on the team is the view of the woman role in general. In some cultures, women are viewed as followers and not as leaders. An individual, who was raised on these values and learned while growing up that he should be the leader and the woman always has to follow him, will encounter a problem while being put in a team with female member as his leader. He will resist her leadership role and try to undermine her decisions and actions. In addition he would try to overrule with his own decisions to show his superior ideas. Such a behavior will not only affect the two individuals, but the whole team. Consequently, the team will be doomed to failure since the essence of team definition is not there anymore; “A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable” [11]

The above example is nothing but one of the many threats multicultural teams face. Other culture related challenges could be direct versus indirect communication, trouble with accents and fluency, differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority, and conflicting norms for decision making. [12]. Cultural differences can also sometimes lead to poor work environment which we discuss in the next section.
5 How Lack of Resources and Poor Work Environment contribute to Team Failures

Lack of resources is among the list of often cited “cause” of project or team failure.[13] Having limited funding for a project, and not having the right people to execute project contribute to project failures. In a multi-project environment, the allocation of resources to each project is important in the strategic planning. [14] One of our team members worked on a technology project within a high tech company. As he mentioned, two projects overlapped, that is the old project was fading away while the new one was being introduced. Due to budget cut, his team maintained the same number of members to work on both projects. A request for headcount increase to ensure a smooth old to new project transition was denied due to financial constrain. As the team supported both projects, member’s workload doubled. Team members were stressed out and were beginning to make simple mistakes that should have been avoided if additional personnel were added to the project execution team. In addition to manpower, there were issues with physical space to accommodate all devices that were required for the projects. This also affected the targeted completion time of the project. Most team leaders or project managers do not include in their planning sufficient resources which include personnel, money, work space, and logistics.

Working in a poor team environment is cited as a second factor that contributes to team or project failure. It is no longer enough to have only the right skills and enough people to do the work. In all of our lives, we are consumed with work and we spend most of our time in a working environment; work is part of us and therefore must be made pleasant for everyone. Working in a team environment requires “trust” [15] which was discussed in another session of the paper. Most projects or teams fail because of bad working environment. Bad work environment affects productivity, and morale of team members. Most work places are team-based and each team may have people from different cultural background. It is therefore important to have a functional team that respects every member in the team. But on the contrary, members within the team developed communication issues that plaque the entire team, and eventually causes tension. Individual performance would be affected and, unfortunately, the team will most likely fail..
Conclusion:

We saw in the research that there are contributing factors causing teams to fail. The lack of trust among team members dominates all components responsible for team failures. It is inevitable for teams to fail if the team lead is not attentive to the surrounding. “Team members not only cooperate in all aspects of their tasks and goals, they share in what are traditionally thought of as management functions, such as planning, organizing, setting performance goals, assessing the team's performance, developing their own strategies to manage change, and securing their own resources”.

Mostly team failures happen due to a combination of these variables. It is difficult to find a case of team failure involving all these variables at the same time. So our research focused on analyzing every variable and researching example of those – instead of finding a case of team failure involving all the variables.




Recommended Readings:

Gareth R. Jones and Jennifer M. George, the Experience and Evolution of Trust: Implications for Cooperation and Teamwork, the Academy of Management Review, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Jul., 1998), pp. 531-546

Academy of management executive, February 2004, Vol 18, No 1, p 88-93, The many dimensions of culture, by Harry C. Triandis.
References:

Mayer, R.C., Davis, J.H. and Schoorman, F.D. (1995), "An integrative model of organizational trust", Academy of Management Review
Vol 20, pp 709-34 Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995)
Doney, P.M., Cannon, J.P., & Mullen, M.R. (1998). Understanding the influence of national culture in the development of trust. Academy of Management Review, 23, 601–620.
Rousseau, M.T., Stikin, S.B., Burt, S.B., & Carmerer, C. (1998). Not so different after all: Acrossdiscipline view of trust. Academy of Management Review, 23, 393–404.
Lewicki, R.J., & Bunker, B.B. (1996). Developing and maintaining trust in work relationships. In R.M. Kramer & T.R. Tyler (Eds.), Trust in organizations: Frontiers of theory and research. (pp. 114–139). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Patrikc Lencioni (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass. ISBN 0787960756.
Leadership and trust facilitating cross-functional team success, Sheila Simsarian Webber, Webber S.S.(2002), The Journal of Management Development, Volume 21, Number 3, 2002 , pp. 201-214(14)
Thompson, Leigh, Eileen Aranda, and Stephen P. Robbins (2000), Tools for Teams, Boston, Pearson Custom Publishing
“Where have all the leaders gone” – Lee Iacocca and Catherine
Wisdom of Teams by Jon R. Katzenbach & Douglas K. Smith Chapter 7 Team Leaders
Kroebeer, A. L. and C. Kluckhohn, 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of concepts and definitions
The wisdom of teams, by Jon R. Katzenbach & Douglas K. Smith, chapter 3, p45.
Harvard business review, managing multicultural team, by Jean Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern., November 2006, p 84-91andComputerworld, 11/20/2006, Vol.47, p36. Managing multicultural team, by Jean Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern.
Why project fail? Manage outcomes, Not Projects, by Peter Flagg
Multi-skilled human resources allocaton in R&D Projects, Antonella CERTA**, Mario ENEA*, Giacomo GALANTE*, Concetta Manuela LA FATA**, Dipartimento di Tecnologia, Produzione Meccanica e Ingegneria Gestionale UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI PALERMO, Viale delle Scienze, 90128, Palermo, ITALY E-mail:galante@dtpm.unipa.it
Thacker, Rebecca A & Yost, Christine A. (2002). Trining Students to Become Effective Workplace Team Leaders. Team Performance Management: An International Journal, 8(3/4) 89-94. Retrieved November 26, 2004 from http://80-proquest.umi.com.lib.pepperdine.edu

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