Managing groups for high performance

Introduction

The team's performance is a crucial successes criteria for a project manager to manage a project to reach its objectives, "Teamwork is a critical factor for project success and developing effective project teams is one of the primary responsibilities of the project manager." .

Nowadays it does not require much effort for a project manager to find tools and techniques about increasing a team´s performance. There is a whole industry providing workshops and guidance about team building. This article will strive to clarify the project manager’s essential role in managing teams, and it will dig further into the dynamics that makes a team work well and which critical issues causes the opposite. With that knowledge gained, the guidelines for establishing a high-performance team will be presented together with relevant tools for managing the high-performance team. The reason why the article starts by explaining the group dynamics before the establishment is to gain knowledge of general groups developments and general issues. In that way the project manager a better understanding of the criteria to choose upon. The focus of this article will be on project level.

Structure of the article

• In the first section, theories of group dynamics, how a group develops, and the most common obstacles, difficulties and issues will be addressed and explained with models and theories as: Five Stages of Group Development, Balancing Conformity and Deviance in Groups, Level of cohesiveness and Social Loafing.

• The following section highlights the parameters a project manager should take into account when creating a high-performance team. Further in this section methods for reassuring high-performance will be outlined, these are: team building, training, reward system .

• In the last section, limitations of the tools and techniques will be discussed with a critical view of the practical usage.

Theories of group dynamics

Definition of a team

All teams are groups, but not all groups are teams. What distinguishes the two definitions is the intensity of work done together to achieve a common goal or objective.

In this article the focus will be on teams, hence project work is from the PMI standards idetifined as being performed by a team The project team includes the project manager and the group of individuals who act together in performing the work of the project to achieve its objectives ... This team is comprised of individuals from different groups with specific subject matter knowledge or with a specific skill set to carry out the work of the project. . Despite this notation, groups are to be more often mentioned in the article, as theories are using “group” in the terminology. Most important to keep in mind is that group theories also apply to teams hence all teams are groups.

High-performance team

A definition of a high-performance team could be: "The ultimate team experience and the one that holds both the greatest challenge as well as opportunity to improve productivity is the high-performance team. Such a team is not simply a group of people."

All team members in a high-performance team must accept a greater deal of responsibility and accountability which is not easy at all for a project manager to get people to make that commitment since most already feel that their job requires enough. Some few key elements the management, or the project manager, needs to communicate to the team members are the importance of their work. They have to evaluate members and their performance individually. They can also make a reward system for the team, to get a clear motivation for high-performance.

Group Norms

Group norms are shared guidelines or rules for behavior created by the members themselves which most members follow. This can be guidelines for working hours, dress code, how to share information or how a certain process should be performed. This is something the project manager should suggest the group to discuss or even to right down in a group contract. This helps the group creating a work environment where it is known what the group expects of behavior. This definition is important to understand when trying to understand what makes a high-performance team, which will be explained later in the article.

Group Dynamics

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Five Stages of Group Development

Despite the fact every group consists of individuals and therefore every group is different, researchers have come up with a model which identify five stages which the majority of groups go through. This model is named Five Stages of Group Development .

Figure 1: Five Stages of Group Development. Inspired from "Essentials of Contemporary Management" .

1. Forming is the first stage and here members of the group try to get an understanding of each other, align their expectations
2. The storming stage is known for the appearance of disagreements and conflicts. These are mainly based on the question of who should lead the group and if some members do not meet the demands of another group member. Here the project manager needs to make sure that the conflicts does not escalades.
3. During the third stage, norming, the group members have come to a consensus about their achievements and they have created strong ties between themselves which gives them a good foundation for performing, which is the fourth stage.
4. The performing stage is where the group members accomplish tasks. Here the project manager is of great importance to ensure continuously motivation and effectiveness. The initial construction of the team also has an importance according to the PM role and how actively he or she should involve in the performing stage.
5. The last stage is the adjourning stage only applied to groups that are to be disbanded, such as project groups. During the adjourning stage reports with pros and cons can be written. REF

The role and responsibility of the project manager is here in this description outlined to be of great importance. This is due to the assumption that it is the PM role and responsibilities in this case. Another view could have been if the PM had chosen a team leader to be in charge of controlling and leading the team.

Conformity and Deviance in Groups

Figure 2: Balancing Conformity and Deviance in Groups. Inspired from "Essentials of Contemporary Management" .

Conformity in groups happens for several reasons. One is to behave to achieve rewards and avoid punishments, another one is when a member copies another members behavior because the person like or admire him or her. The last reason is to behave accordingly to what the norm is in the group, which the members have incarnated as being the right and proper way. Deviance happens when a member does not conform to the norms in the group and therefore signals that the group can not control its members’ behavior. Groups often respond to a member by three different ways. One is to convince the deviant to change his or her behavior in order to conform to the group by presenting consequence scenarios. Another way is simply to expel the member where the last way is the change the groups norms to fit the deviant’s behavior.

Balance of conformity and deviance is important to achieve a high-performance team as the figure demonstrates. Too much conformity will result in a behavior, that is not critical towards the groups norms and behavior. The consequence could for example be that dysfunctional norms are not corrected or acted against to replace them with better and more functional ones. The right amount of deviance will make group members reflect on the group norms and behaviors and change them when needed. On the other hand will too much deviance also result in low performance hence the group cannot control its members and therefore does not succeed to create a good working environment.

The project managers can help guiding the group to find the right balance. There are three ways the PM can be a help.

• The PM can encourage, support and accept suggestions from a group member about change in procedures or norms. This together with explaining that conformity should not outshine the need of change and improvements.
• Secondly, the PM should let the group members know, that there are always ways to improve group processes and opportunities to replace norms to get a higher performance level.
• Third and lastly, PM should encourage groups or teams to review their norms and processes regularly and make changes if needed.

Critical issues that prevents high-performance

The following examples on issues will briefly be explained where the tools and techniques in the following chapter will address the issues.

Level of cohesiveness

Group cohesiveness is seen as a good thing when talking about group dynamics hence it is the degree to which group members are loyal or attracted to their group. When there is too much cohesiveness the groups tend to be less effective due to non-work-related talks for example during meetings. Groups with high level of cohesiveness will also have trouble acting on the best for the organizational goals if it is at the expense of achieving group goals. Too low cohesiveness leads to too much deviance and the group is not able to complete tasks. The factors which leads to a balanced cohesiveness and high-performance teams will be outlined in the next section.

Social loafing

Social loafing is a consequence of...

Application

From previous section the identified key factors that determines success or failure are group size, roles, development, leadership, norms and cohesiveness.

What can a project manager do? In this section it is assumed that the PM can chose the most optimal team based on the theories. The limitations to actual cases will be explained in the next section.

Putting the team together

When a PM stands across the job of putting a team together many factors are to be considered. Some of which the PM can aim for and also a technique based on interpersonal skills.

Group roles and its size

Size There are many advantages in keeping the size of the teams relatively small somewhere between 2 and nine members due to the following reasons:

• The group members interact more with each other and the coordination of efforts gets easier.
• Members of smaller groups feel more committed, motivated and satisfied.
• It is easier to share information.
• It gets easier, especially for the PM, to see and acknowledge individual contributions.

If the team is too small it has fewer resources to drag from, and it can be on the expense of skills, knowledge and experience. MORE REF One of the issues that a good group size prevents to a certain degree is social loafing. It gets harder for the individual member to hide and not deliver if he or she is deviant to the group norms.

Diversity Diversity is a key word when forming a team. The diversity can both be measured in expertise, experience, knowledge and skills or as a composition of members from different divisions e.g. marketing, production, engineering and finance. The strength is avoidance of groupthink. Groupthink is when the team faulty strive for reaching an agreement at the expense of a more correct appraisal. REF CONTEM page 363 A tool to be used to establish a diverse team is too dig deeper into interpersonal skills which can be done with a test called Belbin’s team roles. Here you will get an indication of the team members preferences in team work. MORE REF

A balanced diversity in groups has many good side effects! The change of getting a more balanced cohesiveness is higher. The same regards having a moderate level of deviance in the group to keep challenging the norms without it getting out of hand.

Manage a high-performance team

• Training
• Teambuilding
• Appraisals

To prevent social loafing there is different methods to be used by the project manager.

Limitations

Project managers may not put his or her team together, which the PMI standard also addresses. Reasons varies from collective bargaining agreements, internal or external relationships, use of subcontractors, matrix project environment or another reason by many others. Constraints are of many including economic factors, too low competencies or already assigned resources to other projects within a company. Failure to acquire the necessary team members for the project can affect budgets, customer satisfaction, project schedules,the quality, and risks. Insufficient teams or capabilities can decrease the probability of success and or could in worst case scenario, result in cancelled project.

These limitations should be considered and planned in the start-up face of the project. If there is any unavailability of required skills or competencies, the project manager has to reflect on the impact in the project budget, schedule, quality, risks, training plans, and other project management plans. .

The theory of composing a team with great diversity is the optimal solution. The limitations for the project manager lies in the issue of finding the right people for exactly that project within the company who has the time to join a project group. In the cases where it is not possible to collect a team the project manager needs to hire new employees dedicated to a specific project or to project work in general. Other examples of putting together the right team is when the management choose to hire a consultant team to do the project. This is often done when it is known, that the time issue is too big of a obstacle, the expenses of hiring new employees are too big or that the expertise for the given project is not to be found in-house. If a team is established from different departments within a company, silo thinking can be a limitation for a project manager to reach high motivation from all team members if the project only gets a recognition in a certain department. Here a reward system should be applied REF

How do you know the needs

People develops, take that into account

Though that is rarely possible in an organization, just to   due to the 

The limitations for the project manager

Annotated bibliography

BORROWED

• Essentials of Contemporary Management, Sixth Edition - Chapter 9

The Chapter, Motivation, looks at motivation from a general perspective within management. It looks in depth at a few key models and theories within motivation management, and one theory in particular, expectancy theory looks into the relationship between individuals efforts and the individuals believes in those efforts resulting in something desirable for him or her.

• A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), Fifth Edition -Chapter 13

This was very much the starting point for this article. The chapter, Project Stakeholder Management, gives a good overview of the the whole process, identifying and planning stakeholder management, managing stakeholder engagement and controlling it underway. Given the good and modern structure of this chapter, it can be seen how the article follows similar setup.

• Advising upwards: managing the perceptions and expectations of senior management stakeholders.

This article explains the Stakeholder circle methodology very well. It categorizes the stakeholders nicely and in combination with the power-interest grid helps correctly placing the stakeholders. Furthermore, it offers further reading on managing the senior managers of a company in a project.