Organizational Culture & Teams

The purpose of this blog post is to address the qualities that are necessary for teams to be highly functional in today’s dynamic workplace. It’s important to point out that today’s workplace cultures demand that teams not only be highly functioning, but also self-managed in many cases. Organizations that aren’t committed to developing a strong team culture run the risk of being highly ineffective, less profitable, and unable to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace.

For starters, high functioning teams understand the importance of vision and purpose. Hatzenback and Smith define a team as “ a group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose and set of performance goals and hold themselves mutually accountable (Hatzenback & Smith 1993). According to Daniel & Davis (2009), high performance teams first and foremost understand the team’s mission as a shared agenda. In many cases, the team’s mission includes an understanding of what needs to be accomplished, as well as completion dates and important milestones (Daniel & Davis 2009). Secondly, high performance teams have an operational team structure that enables easy cross-functional relationships. At the end of the day, cooperation, engagement, and flexible participation are vital to the long-term success of the team itself and to achievement.

When it comes to analyzing high performance teams, it’s also important to point out that effective communication is absolutely essential. And according to Pentland (2012) face-to-face communication seems to be the most valuable. It seems that the best team players communicate in such a way that not only connects their teammates with one another, but also spreads ideas around (Pentland 2012). Pentland described these team players as “charismatic connectors.” With that being said, high performance teams are also not opposed to seeking quality ideas outside the group, but not at the expense of the engagement of team members within the primary group (Pentland 2012). Lastly, in an MIT study of executives, it was discovered that the more charismatic connectors a team has, the most successful and high performing the team tends to be (Pentland 2012).

References

Daniel, L. J., & Davis, C. R. (2009). What Makes High Performance Teams Excel? Research Technology Management, 52(4), 40-45.

Hatzenback, J. & Smith, D. (1993). The Wisdom of Team Creating the High-Performance Organization. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Pentland, A. (2012). The New Science of Building Great Teams. Harvard Business Review, 90(4), 60-70.