Effective Management Teams and Organizational Behavior

A Research-Based Model for Team Development

Henning Bang, Thomas Nesset Midelfart

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000352368
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Organisational Development

Most contemporary organizations use management teams to manage and coordinate their businesses at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. Management teams typically set overall goals, strategies, and priorities, making vital organizational decisions. They discuss issues, solve problems, offer advice, and ensure various processes and units are aligned and interact efficiently. Although management teams are vital for overall organizational performance, research indicates that they are largely underused and less effective than their potential would suggest for value creation.

This book provides a research-based and practical model of the characteristics of effective management teams. It looks in depth at each factor of the model, discusses the supporting research, provides examples of how the factors influence the work and effectiveness of management teams, and shares tips and tools for successfully working with management team development.

It provides researchers, academics, and students of organizational behavior with an overview of the variables that empirical research has found to be robustly related to management team effectiveness and will enable leaders and management consultants to develop more effective management teams.

Part I
The Management Team

What is a management team, and what distinguishes it from other types of work groups and teams? How do top management teams differ from management teams at lower levels in the organization? Is a management team a real team, and what are the practical consequences of the degree of “teamness” for how the management teams work?

Part I will lay the foundation for answering these questions. In Chapter 1, we summarize our model of what it means to be an effective management team, and we identify the fundamental conditions and processes of key significance for management team performance. In Chapter 2, we address what characterizes management teams and how they are different from other types of teams, and finally in Chapter 3, we discuss what it means to be a team and whether a management team can be said to be a real team.

1
A Model for Effectiveness in Management Teams

Most of the organizations use teams to manage and coordinate their businesses—at both the top and lower levels throughout the organizational hierarchy.¹ Leading team researchers J. Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman define a management team as “a group of individuals, each of whom has a personal responsibility for leading some part of an organization, who are interdependent for the purpose of providing overall leadership for a larger enterprise.”² A management team generally consists of a senior manager and the managers who report directly to him or her. The team meets regularly with its main goal being to provide strategic, operational, and institutional leadership for the organizational unit it heads.³ Thus, each member not only is responsible for his or her own unit or function but also explicitly wears another “hat”—that of corporate leadership.⁴

Management teams deal with tasks that are difficult to handle effectively as individual managers. They typically set overall goals, strategies, and priorities and make decisions vital to the organization. Members discuss issues, solve problems, give one another advice, and monitor ongoing processes within the organization. Members also inform one another about important issues and help ensure that the organization’s various processes and units are aligned and interact efficiently.⁵ According to Wageman and colleagues,⁶ a management team can “provide the flexibility to transcend the traditional silo mentality that pervades many organizations and to effectively manage the important but often ambiguous white spaces that lie between those silos.” An effective management team makes a positive contribution to the organization’s value-creation process; it creates added value relative to what could be achieved if the managers were operating as isolated individuals. Hence, management teams hold the potential to strongly influence the performance of an organization.⁷

Many review articles and textbooks present research-based models of team effectiveness in work teams, in general.⁸ Although there are literally thousands of scientific papers published on management teams,⁹ there are hardly any books or articles that present a research-based and comprehensive model that are particularly relevant for management team effectiveness. Two notable exceptions are Wageman et al.¹⁰ and Darren Overfield.¹¹ These publications suggest integrated frameworks of variables influencing performance in management teams. However, neither of these two frameworks was developed through a broad and systematic review of the research on management teams and decision-making groups. Both were built on Hackman’s¹² generic team effectiveness model, with variables identified as vital to team effectiveness in all types of teams, not specifically management teams. The aim of this book is therefore to suggest such an integrated model, with variables that predict effectiveness, based on a broad review of international research on management teams and decision-making teams from the early 1970s through today (see Figure 1.1).

We have grounded the model partly in research done on management teams in particular and partly in studies of teams and work groups facing challenges similar to those faced by management teams (e.g., decision-making and problem-solving groups). We have simultaneously consulted general team research and included studies from this field that are of obvious relevance to management teams. The model is relevant for researchers and for practitioners who want an overview of the key factors to focus on when they are aiming to help management teams succeed.

Since 2013, we have collected data on management teams at different levels and in different branches, using a survey—effect¹³—with scales developed for measuring the variables presented in this model. In this book, we will present findings from the analyses of data from these teams. The data were collected from January 2013 to July 2017. In our study, 40% of the management teams were recruited from different team-development programs that they attended, while the remaining 60% were asked to participate as part of a research project on management teams. The sample consisted of 215 management teams, comprising 1,332 respondents (55% male and 45% female); 50% of the management teams were from private or public business organizations, 24% were from governmental agencies (ministries and directorates), and 26% were from the county or municipal sector; 25% were top management teams (level 1), 35% were from management teams directly below a top management team (level 2), and 40% were located further down in the organizational hierarchy (level 3 or below). The management teams ranged from 3 to 23 members, with a mean of 7.37 (SD = 3.78).

We have organized the variables into a model¹⁴ in which we distinguish among the following four dimensions:

• Inputs: Relatively stable characteristics of the management team and the team’s environment. These variables can be seen as the basic conditions for effective teamwork.

  

  Figure 1.1 A model for effectiveness in management teams

• Processes: Variables that refer to how the management team works when transforming team inputs into outputs. Processes include both task-related processes (how the members work together on team tasks) and interpersonal processes (what happens on the psychological level when members work together).
• Emergent states: Variables that are “properties of the team that are typically dynamic in nature and vary as a function of team context, inputs, processes, and outcomes.”¹⁵ They describe cognitive, motivational, and affective states that emerge in the team and can be considered indicators of team viability.¹⁶
• Outputs: Variables that describe “results and by-products of team activity that are valued by one of more constituencies.”¹⁷ We distinguish between two different kinds of outcomes achieved by the management team—task performance, and individual well-being and growth.

The four classes of factors are interrelated and will influence each other: Input factors will influence processes, emergent states, and output factors; the output factors will influence and be influenced by emergent states; and the emergent states will influence the team processes, and they may after a time even become stable characteristics of the management team.

In the subsequent chapters of this book, we will discuss in depth the model, addressing each individual variable in detail. In Chapter 4, we start with the output and emergent states and explain what it means to be an effective management team. In Chapters 5 through 15, we move on to explore the fundamental conditions and processes of key significance for management team performance. In Chapters 16 and 17, we provide tips and practical tools for how to develop an effective and well-functioning management team.

A Summary of the Model

An effective management team achieves excellent output in two areas. First, it creates added value for the organization by processing, discussing, and making decisions on matters of key importance to the operations and development of the organization. Second, it produces added value for each of the team members, so each member experiences being part of the team as a source of motivation, learning, and development and thus is helped to do a better job as a leader of his or her own unit.

Effective management teams create emergent states that enhance members’ capability to work interdependently in the future.¹⁸ A management team consists of members who are (to a greater or lesser degree) interdependent in achieving common goals and whose success depends on their ability to cooperate and coordinate their actions. It is, therefore, vital that the team develops into a psychologically safe, cohesive group, with a functional team culture that stimulates collaboration and effective functioning.¹⁹ Team psychological safety, team cohesion, and a functional team culture are all emergent states that will greatly affect the team members’ capability to work interdependently in the future.

When we use the expression “effective management teams,” we refer to management teams that create all three types of results: added value for the organization, added value for the team members, and emergent states that enhance the capability of team members to work interdependently in the future.

There are a number of basic conditions for becoming an effective management team. The inputs, or basic conditions, for team effectiveness include relatively stable characteristics of the m...