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Keywords Team management, Performance management, Performance measures
Abstract Teamwork is a key feature of work in organisations and a central question in the extensive literature on teams concerns the ways that team performance can be measured. This paper summarises the concept of team performance and, focussing on management teams, reports the results of an extensive study into team members' constructions of performance. Factor analysis of data collected through 60 repertory grid structured interviews with members of management teams suggests seven factors that represent team performance. The factors are: team purpose; team organisation; team leadership; team climate; interpersonal relations; team communications; and team composition. An eighth factor, team interaction with the wider organisation, is suggested from theoretical considerations and is included in an eight-factor model of team performance.
Workgroups and teams
Social psychology is concerned with the ways that attitudes and behaviour are affected by interactions with others. Group behaviour is a core concern and encompasses how groups take decisions and behave with respect to group members. Groups in organisations are a long-standing topic of interest with classic studies stemming from the work of Follett and Mayo in the 1920s, the Hawthorne studies (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939) and the influential work on "groupthink" concerning ineffective decision making by groups including those in strategic policy-making situations (Janis, 1972). The concept of work teams, however, is relatively recent although the literatures on groups and teams have much in common and the terms have now become largely interchangeable. Despite the pedigree and the proliferation of work teams in organisations as a modern form of organising, the concept of work teams remains contested and the term is used to describe a wide range of radically different working arrangements (Huczynski and Buchanan, 2001). A group can be considered as, "any number of people who (1) interact with one another; (2) are psychologically aware of one another; and (3) perceive themselves to be a group" (Schein, 1988, p. 145). Other characteristics of effective workgroups include "shared aims and objectives", "mutual trust and dependency" and "decision-making by consensus" (Mullins, 2002, p. 477) and the concepts of co-ordination and interdependency, the notion of "members adjusting to each other sequentially and simultaneously in order to achieve goals" (Baker and Salas, 1997, p. 332). Baker...