Improving team performance

Main body of article review

Teamwork: highly valued by so many organizations – and often so very hard to achieve! As a result, many job specifications state that the role requires “a good team player”. What is harder to find is evidence of whether “good” teams deliver superior performance.

What is a good team?

There has been a lot of research on how to achieve high-performing teams. For a team to be effective, it needs:

• a clear goal, a result-driven structure and standards of excellence;

• competent, committed team members who collaborate;

• external support and recognition; and

• principled leadership.

Team players can adopt many different roles

Belbin observed that people in successful teams adopt different but compatible roles, but unsuccessful teams experience role conflict, lack of cooperation and personality clashes. He identified the main roles team members could adopt – each demonstrating different personalities and behavior and all necessary for a team to work well. These were grouped into three main clusters:

• Action-oriented roles:

  • implementers who translate and apply the team’s concepts and plans;

  • shapers who challenge, argue and disagree; and

  • the completer/finisher who focuses on getting things right.

• People-oriented roles:

  • resource investigators, exploring potentially useful resources outside the team;

  • the coordinator who organizes and controls team activities; and

  • team workers, creating and maintaining team spirit.

• Roles focused on problem-solving:

  • the plant – someone with creativity, imagination and innovation. They generate ideas and ways to achieve team objectives; and

  • the monitor-evaluator who analyzes proposals considered by the team.

… but how necessary is role diversity to team performance?

This approach indicates that the difference between successful and unsuccessful teams depends mainly on:

• behavior;

• the way team members make decisions;

• how they...