Cross-functional teams  employees from about the same hierarchical level, but from different work areas, who come together to accomplish a task

4. Virtual teams  teams that use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members in order to achieve a common goal. For virtual teams to be effective, management should ensure that:

 Trust is established among team members.

 Team progress is monitored closely.

 The efforts and products of the virtual team are publicised throughout the organization.

4. Identify the characteristics of effective teams.

The key components of effective teams can be subsumed into four general categories, see page 267!

1. The resources and other contextual influences that make teams effective.

2. The team’s composition.

3. Work design.

4. Process variables reflect those things that go on in the team that influences effectiveness.

The four contextual factors that appear to be most significantly related to team performance are:

 Adequate resources

 Effective leadership  especially important in multi-team systems  systems in which different teams need to coordinate their efforts to produce a desired outcome.

 A climate of trust

 A performance evaluation and reward system that reflects team contributions

The team composition category includes variables that relate to how teams should be staffed:

 Abilities of members  to perform effectively, a team requires three different types of skills:

1. Technical expertise

2. Problem-solving and decision-making skills 3. Interpersonal skills

 Personality of members  three of the Big Five traits are especially important for team performance, namely conscientiousness, openness to experience and agreeableness.

 Allocation of roles  see page 271.

 Diversity of members  the key is for diverse teams to communicate what they uniquely know and also what they don’t know. Organizational demography  the degree to which members of a work unit share a common demographic attribute, such as age, sex, race, educational level or length of service in an organization, and the impact of this attribute on turnover.

 Size of teams  the most effective teams have five to nine members.

 Member preferences  high performing teams are likely to be composed of people who prefer working as part of a group.

These work design characteristics motivate because they increase member’s sense of responsibility and ownership of the work and because they make the work more interesting to perform:

 Freedom

 Autonomy

 Skill variety

 Task identity

 Task significance

Process variables:

Potential group effectiveness + Process gains – Process losses = Actual group effectiveness

 Common plan and purpose  it provides direction and guidance under any and all conditions.

Effective teams also show reflexivity  a team characteristic of reflecting on and adjusting the master plan when necessary.

 Specific goals  must be specific, measurable, realistic and challenging.

 Team efficacy  teams have confidence in themselves.

 Mental models  team member’s knowledge and beliefs about how the work gets done by the team.

 Conflict levels  effective teams can be characterised as having an appropriate level of conflict, task conflicts may be helpful, interpersonal conflicts are not.

 Social loafing  successful teams make members individually and jointly accountable for the team’s purpose, goals, and approach.

5. Show how organizations can create team players.

The following are the primary options managers have for trying to turn individuals into team players:

 Selection: hiring team players  make team skills one of the interpersonal skills in the hire process.

 Training: creating team players  individualistic people can learn.

 Rewarding: providing incentives to be a good team player  encourage cooperative efforts rather than competitive (individual) ones and continue to recognize individual contributions while still emphasizing the importance of teamwork.

6. Decide when to use individuals instead of teams.

It has been suggested that three tests be applied to see if a team fits the situation.

1. Can the work be done better by more than one person? A good indicator is the complexity of the work and the need for different perspectives.

2. Does the work create a common purpose or set of goals for the people in the group that is more than the aggregate of individual goals?

3. Are the members of the group interdependent? Using teams makes sense when there is interdependence between tasks – when the success of the whole depends on the success of each one and the success of each one depends on the success of the others.

7. Show how the understanding of teams differ in a global context.

Chapter 11: Communication

Communication  the transference and understanding of meaning.

1. Identify the main functions of communication.

Communication serves four major functions within a group or organization:

 It acts to control member behaviour in several ways.

 It fosters motivation by clarifying to employees what is to be done, how well they are doing, and what can be done to improve performance if it’s below expectations.

 It provides a release for the emotional expression of feelings and for fulfilment of social needs.

 It provides the information that individuals and groups need to make decisions by transmitting the data to identify and evaluate alternative choices.

 It reduces uncertainty

 It coordinates actions

Effective communication is crucial for task performance.

2. Describe the communication process and distinguish between formal and informal communication.

Communication process  the steps between a source and a receiver that result in the transfer and understanding of meaning. The key parts of this model are:

 The sender initiates a message by encoding a thought.

 The message is the actual physical product from the sender’s encoding.

 The channel is the medium through which the message travels. It is selected by the sender, who must determine whether to use a formal or informal channel:

o Formal channels  communication channels established by an organization to transmit messages related to the professional activities of members.

o Informal channels  communication channels that are created spontaneously and that emerge as responses to individual choices.

 The receiver is the object to whom the message is directed.

 But before the message can be received, the symbols in it must be translated into a form that can be understood by the deceiver  decoding.

 Noise represents communication barriers that distort the clarity of the message.

 Feedback is the check on how successful we have been in transferring our message as

originally intended. It determines whether understanding has been achieved. A return message regarding the initial communication.

3. Contrast downward, upward, and lateral communication and provide examples of each.

Communication can flow vertically or laterally. The vertical dimension can be further divided into downward and upward directions.

 Downward communication  communication that flows from one level of a group or organization to a lower level. The best communicators are those who explain the reasons behind their downward communications, but also solicit upward communication from the employees they supervise.

 Upward communication  communication that flows to a higher level in the group or organization. To engage in effective upward communication, try to reduce distractions, communicate in headlines not paragraphs, support your headlines with actionable items and prepare an agenda to make sure you use your boss’s attention well.

 Lateral communication  when communication takes place among members of the same work group, among members of work groups at the same level, among managers at the same level, or among any other horizontally equivalent personnel. It is often necessary to save time and facilitate coordination.

4. Contrast oral, written and nonverbal communication.

There are three basic methods to transfer meaning:

 Oral communication

o Advantages: speed and feedback.

o Disadvantage: the more people a message must pass through, the greater the potential distortion and misunderstandings.

 Written communication

o Advantages: often tangible and verifiable. Well thought out, logical and clear.

o Disadvantage: time-consuming and lacks feedback.

 Nonverbal communication  the two most important messages that body language conveys are the extent to which an individual likes another and is interested in their views and the relative perceived status between a sender and receiver. Intonations or emphasis we give to words. Facial expressions also convey a meaning.The way individuals space themselves in terms of physical distance also has a meaning.

o Advantages: supports other communications and provides observable expression of emotions and feelings

o Disadvantage: misperception of body language or gesture can influence receiver’s interpretation of message.

5. Contrast formal communication networks and the grapevine.

Formal organizational networks can be condensed into three common small groups of five people each.

 Chain  rigidly follows the formal chain of command.

 Wheel  relies on a central figure to act as the conduit for all the group’s communication.

 All-channel  permits all group members to actively communicate with each other, so self-managed teams.

Grapevine  an organization’s informal communication network. It has three main characteristics:

1. It is not controlled by management, so informal.

2. It is perceived by most employees as being more believable and reliable than formal communiqués issued by top management.

3. It is largely used to serve the self-interests of people within it.

Rumours emerge as a response to situations that are important to us, when there is ambiguity, and under conditions that arouse anxiety. The fact that work situations frequently contain these three elements explain why rumours flourish in organizations.

The grapevine is an important part of any group or organization communication network. It gives managers a feel for the morale of their organization, identifies issues that employees consider important, and helps tap into employee anxieties. The grapevine also serves employees’ needs.

Reducing rumours:

 Announce timetables for making important decisions

 Explain decisions and behaviours that may appear inconsistent or secretive

 Emphasize the downside, as well as the upside, of current decisions and future plans

 Openly discuss worst-case possibilities – they are almost never as anxiety-provoking as the unspoken fantasy

6. Analyse the advantages and challenges of electronic communication.

Electronic communications include:

 E-mail uses the internet to transmit and receive computer-generated text and documents.

o Advantages: quickly written, sent, and stored, and it has low costs for distribution.

o Disadvantages:

 Misinterpreting the message

 Not appropriate for communicating negative messages

 Overuse of e-mail

 Removes inhibitions and can cause emotional responses and flaming, it is difficult to get emotional state understood

 Privacy concerns

 Instant messaging and text messaging o Advantages: fast and inexpensive

o Disadvantages: intrusive, distracting and unsecure, can be seen as too informal

 Networking software

 Internet or web logs  a website where entries are written, generally displayed in reverse chronological order, about news, events and personal diary entries.

o Disadvantages: blogs could be construed as harmful to a company’s reputation.

 Video conferencing  permits employees in an organization to have meetings with people at different locations.

o Advantages: alternative to expensive and time-consuming travel.

Knowledge management (KM)  the process of organising and distributing an organization’s collective wisdom so the right information gets to the right people at the right time. When done properly, KM provides an organization with both a competitive edge and improved organizational performance because it makes its employees smarter.

7. Show how channel richness underlies the choice of communication channel.

A model of media richness has been developed to explain channel selection among managers.

Research has found that channels differ in their capacity to convey information. Some are rich in that they have the ability to:

1. Handle multiple cues simultaneously 2. Facilitate rapid feedback

3. Be very personal

Channel richness  the amount of information that can be transmitted during a communication episode.