Creating effective teams by means of mathematical modelling

Created by Rune Huntley Andersen, February 2022

The use of teams in organisations has enlarged rapidly the past 30 years, in correlation with the vast amount of more complex tasks in almost any industry. This development has augmented the requirements in management, since additional factors have altering influence on the work process, compared to individuals working solitarily. It requires insight in the process of people collaborating, to achieve a common goal. Nonetheless there’re scarce information about the process of achieving a high performing team, or effective team, from a managerial perspective.

A lot of literature and theories about group creation, group dynamics and group development has been utilized over the years, which widens the scope of the subject. Though, much of the literature available erects from the same origin, which can therefore be summed to a more general model for team effectiveness. This article intends to review the relevant literature to outline the current knowledge of creating teams and examine the factors influencing on team effectiveness. This is outlined through the general model, which describes the determining factors in team effectiveness.

Even though the literature illuminates a lot of factors determining team effectiveness, the applicability in practice is not so clear. Devine & Phillips developed a meta-analysis to investigate the link between cognitive ability in teams and the performance of the team, to create a hands-on scheme for predicting team effectiveness. This study is focused on the abilities on the team members as individuals, and are therefore not considering the context, which, in the team effective model, is stated to be a huge factor for team effectiveness. T. Meridith Ross & Eric C. Jones have conducted a more holistic framework which has led to a more substantial mathematical process for predicting team effectiveness. These studies constitute the aim of the discussion for this article.

Creating effective teams

Work groups and teams are widely used in almost every kind of labour activity across the world, which is why teams are regarded as an essential part of most companies and organisations. A common definition of a team is that it consists of individuals who are working interdependently, in a joint effort in which synergy effects emerge, whereas groups are independent individuals who interact and exchange information to achieve a particular goal. The definition of a team by Robbins, Judge and Campbell is given as “A group whose individual efforts result in performance that is greater than the sum of the individual inputs”. This definition refers to the synergy effect mentioned in the broader definition. Since teams are such valued parts of most organisations, several studies have been conducted with the interest of optimising the performance of teams, by analysing the influencing factors.

Much of the research that has been conducted about teams, has led to several methods, concepts, and models. These models are mainly created as linear frameworks with the purpose of predicting the input-parameters leading to team effectiveness. McGrath is a predominant psychiatrist who worked out the framework known as the I-P-O model. This concept introduces three factors influencing team effectiveness and the interaction between. The three factors are input-process-output (I-P-O). This framework was used to explain the influence of different input factors and the team’s interaction process on the team’s performance. The input-variables include the following four aspects: individual factors, team factors, environmental factors, and target factors, whereas the process-variables include interpersonal relation, conflict levels, commitment, and resource monitoring. McGrath’s work has inspired a lot of the later concepts and theories about team performance and team effectiveness, by evaluating the interconnection between different personal traits in a team. The framework by McGrath therefore recurs in most of the later developed theories and concepts in some form. Although the framework is widely acknowledged, it is today seen as insufficient to describe teams, since it lacks to capture the emerging consensus about teams being complex and adaptive systems.

“In another sense, however, the convergence on consensus regarding the utility of I-P-O models as a guide to empirical research fails to capture the emerging consensus about teams as complex, adaptive systems. Indeed, the I-P-O framework is insufficient for characterizing teams”

This is exemplified by the very linear approach to describing a team’s process. It lacks more detailed information about the input parameters, which is not always a straightforward process.

“I-P-O framework tends to suggest a linear progression of main effect influences proceeding from one category (I, P, or O) to the next. However, much of the recent research has moved beyond this.”

The underlying pattern of having several input factors influencing team performance is nevertheless still well recognised, but with a stronger acceptance of the complex processes that can erect during the different stages. Understanding the complex processes is an important aspect of management, when working with teams. It’s also vital to understand the distinctive workflow and characteristics of different kinds of teams, since they require various motivational components, given as the aforementioned input factors, to achieve effectiveness. Robbins, Judge and Campbell defines the four most common types of teams you’re likely to find in organisations as: problem-solving teams, self-managed work teams, cross-functional teams, and virtual teams. Robbins, Judge and Campbell has summarised what is currently known about the influencing factors on team effectiveness in a relatively focused model, which is named the “team effectiveness model”.

Team effectiveness model

The term team effectiveness in the model is regarded as both objective measures of the team’s productivity, managers’ rating of the team’s performance and aggregate measures of team member satisfaction. This is a broad scope of the outcome, which is in accordance with the rather complex understanding of rating a team’s efforts. In the team effectiveness model , the key components of effective teams are subsumed into four general categories, Context, Composition, Work design and Process, respectively. These four categories cover some of the same aspects as the input variables in the IPO-model but represents them as solely influencing parameters and therefore not describing the procedural effect. The parameters in the model are a representation of the factors that are known today, to have an influence on team performance. In the following, each component will be described and summarised according to the definition by the authors.

Team effectiveness model created by the author (Inspired by model 10.3 )

Annotated Bibliography

[1] Robbins, Judge, & Campbell. (2010). Organizational behaviour (13th ed.). Pearson Education.

This book has been utilised to clarify and provide a deep insight into the knowledge of work teams. In the book they describe several managerial issues or challenges with working with teams in organisations. For this article, the most important inspiration has been on the variables affecting team effectiveness and the explanation of different types of work teams. The authors of this book also provided the "team effectiveness model", which has acted as a central aspect of this article. In addition the book contributes to a broad range of managerial topics with in depth description of several methods on conflicts, communication, leadership etc.

[2] Devine, D. J., & Philips, J. L. (2001). Do Smarter Teams Do Better. Small Group Research, 32(5), 507–532. https://doi.org/10.1177/104649640103200501

In this article, the authors have done an analysis on the correlation between cognitive ability and team performance. In the article the process of the analysis is deeply described and serves as a highly relevant reference, since it gives an insight in one approach to predict team effectiveness mathematically. The point of bringing this reference is to analyse an approach that questions the knowledge known today about team effectiveness, and compare results with more recent knowledge.

[3] Meredith Ross, Jones, & Adams. (2008). Can team effectiveness be predicted?, 248–268. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235307866_Can_team_effectiveness_be_predicted

This article proposes an approach to predicting team effectiveness, that is more aligned with recent knowledge, when it comes to the influencing factors and variables. This article is interesting and highly relevant since it builds on huge amounts of previous frameworks and concepts and involve a great deal of research data. It contributes with a holistic perspective on how to predict team effectiveness, which can form the future research in the topic.