Groups and teams

1 Introduction

Almost nothing in an organisation is achieved by individuals working alone: performance is delivered by groups and, above all, by teams. This chapter looks at what groups are and why they matter, how to build a team whose members complement each other (Belbin), how teams develop over time (Tuckman), what distinguishes genuinely high-performing teams, how to keep team members motivated – and how all of this changes when the team is virtual or hybrid, working together without sharing an office.

2 Groups

Groups can be formal or informal:

• Formal groups are created and recognised by management – a department, a committee, a project team.

• Informal groups arise naturally and are not created by management, which may not even know they exist – the people who lunch together, the ex-colleagues who still compare notes. Elton Mayo’s investigations first showed how powerful informal groups can be: they develop their own norms, which can support management’s aims or quietly resist them. We are social beings, we like belonging to groups, and a manager who ignores the informal organisation is managing with one eye shut.

Handy defined a group as “any collection of people who perceive themselves to be a group” – a good definition precisely because the test is perception, so it covers informal groups as well as formal ones. Handy said any group will have:

• A sense of purpose or aim – which for an informal group might be anything from improving quality to resisting Saturday working.

• An identity – a shared sense of who is inside the group and who is not.

• Group norms – accepted ways of behaving; break them and the group is likely to exclude you.

• Communication between the members.

3 Teams and Belbin’s team roles

A team is a formal group deliberately created by management with a specific objective. One great advantage of a team is that it combines different technical skills: a team implementing a new IT system might include an IT specialist, an accountant and a production manager, each contributing expertise and representing their department’s interests, so that the team is stronger than any one member could be.

But people bring more than technical skills – they bring different psychological profiles. Meredith Belbin identified nine team roles, patterns of behaviour that people naturally adopt in a team, and devised questionnaires to help people discover their own:

Belbin’s point is that a strong team needs all of these roles present – but not nine people: most people are strong in two or three roles, so a well-chosen team of four or five can cover the set. Balance matters in the other direction too: two shapers, each wanting their own way, is a recipe for conflict, and a team of nothing but plants will generate wonderful ideas and finish nothing.

4 Tuckman: stages of team development

Teams do not perform from day one. Tuckman observed that every group passes through a sequence of stages:

• Forming. A slow, tentative beginning: should we form a group at all? What is it for? Who else is in it? In informal groups, a gradual coming together of people with shared interests.

• Storming. Members compete for roles and influence – two shaper types, perhaps, fighting over who will lead or speak for the group. Conflict at this stage is normal and, handled well, productive: it is how the team tests ideas and settles who does what.

• Norming. The group establishes its norms: how it will work, how decisions get made, how often it meets, what behaviour is acceptable.

• Performing. At last the group produces useful output. Members know each other, know the group’s purpose, know who leads, and can concentrate on the task.

• Adjourning (added later by Tuckman and Jensen). The task complete, the group winds up and disbands – ideally with its achievement recognised and its lessons captured. A group that fails to adjourn and meets on out of habit is sometimes said to be dorming: half-asleep, achieving little, and overdue for disbanding.

Two practical lessons follow. First, nothing useful is produced until the performing stage, so anything management can do to accelerate the early stages is worthwhile – and with a formal team much of it can be done at creation: management defines the team’s purpose and membership, appoints its leader (defusing the storm), and sets its meeting and reporting arrangements (settling the norms), so the team can move quickly to performing. Second, Tuckman observed that whenever membership changes – one member leaves, another joins – the group slips back through the stages and performance dips; managers should plan introductions and handovers so the disruption is as small as possible.

5 Characteristics of high-performing teams

What separates a genuinely high-performing team from a group of people who merely share a task? Research and experience keep pointing to the same characteristics:

• A clear, shared purpose – everyone can state what the team exists to achieve and what success looks like, and the goal is challenging enough to matter (Chapter 4’s target-setting principles apply to teams too).

• Complementary skills and roles – the right technical mix and the Belbin roles covered, with members clear about who does what.

• Mutual accountability – members hold themselves and each other responsible for the team’s results, rather than leaving quality control to the leader.

• Trust and psychological safety – members feel safe to speak up, ask questions, challenge ideas and admit mistakes without fear of ridicule or blame. Study after study finds this the single strongest predictor of team performance: without it, problems stay hidden until they are expensive.

• Open communication and constructive conflict – disagreement about ideas is welcomed and worked through; conflict about personalities is dealt with, not left to fester (managing conflict is covered in Chapter 7).

• The right size – small enough for everyone to contribute and co-ordinate easily; large teams fragment into sub-groups and passengers.

• A focus on results and improvement – the team measures its performance, reviews how it is working, and keeps adjusting.

6 Motivating team members

Everything Chapter 4 said about motivation applies inside teams, with some team-specific twists:

• The team itself motivates – belonging, shared purpose and recognition from respected colleagues serve the social and esteem needs in Maslow’s hierarchy; for many people the team is the most motivating thing about work.

• Free-riding is the standing danger – if rewards and recognition attach only to the team, weaker contributors can coast on colleagues’ effort, which corrodes the motivation of the strong. The remedies are visible individual contributions, mutual accountability, and rewards that blend team and individual elements.

• Fairness is felt intensely in teams – members constantly compare workloads and rewards; perceived unfairness in either demotivates faster than low pay.

• Give the team autonomy – empowering a team to decide how it achieves its objective (Chapter 4’s empowerment, applied collectively) builds ownership and engagement.

• Recognise the team and the people in it – celebrate team milestones, but notice individual contributions too, matching the recognition to what each person values (Vroom’s valence).

7 Virtual and hybrid teams

Digital technology means many teams now work virtually – members in different locations, often different countries and time zones, collaborating through digital tools – or in hybrid mode, partly co-located and partly remote. The syllabus singles out the leadership of virtual teams because everything in this chapter still applies, but much of it becomes harder when the team never shares a room:

• Trust and cohesion must be built deliberately. Co-located teams build trust through everyday contact – corridor conversations, coffee, small favours. Virtual teams get none of that free, so leaders must engineer it: proper introductions, some social time in calls, and where possible an early face-to-face meeting, which pays for itself for months.

• Communication loses its richest channel. Most cues in face-to-face communication are non-verbal; on email and chat they vanish, and misunderstandings and imagined slights multiply. Virtual teams over-rely on written channels, so leaders should choose the channel to fit the message – video for anything sensitive or ambiguous, written channels for records and routine (communication and digital collaboration tools are covered in Chapter 7).

• Time zones force asynchronous working. The team cannot rely on everyone being available at once, so it needs explicit norms: which tools for what, expected response times, shared documents as the single source of truth, decisions recorded where everyone can see them – and meeting times that rotate the inconvenience fairly rather than always favouring head office.

• Manage outputs, not presence. A manager who cannot see people working must either trust them or descend into surveillance – and Chapter 4 explained what surveillance does to engagement. The answer is Theory Y management: clear objectives and deadlines (SMART targets matter more, not less, in virtual teams), then judge people on what they deliver, not on when their status light is green.

• Watch for isolation and unfairness. Remote members can feel invisible and disconnected; long days of back-to-back video calls are genuinely fatiguing; and in hybrid teams proximity bias – the human tendency to notice, favour and promote the people physically present – can quietly punish those who work remotely. Leaders must include remote members deliberately: invite them into discussions, rotate visible assignments, and appraise on results so that career progress does not depend on office attendance.

The leadership behaviours that work in virtual teams are, in short: over-communicate clarity (goals, roles, deadlines), hold structured and predictable check-ins – frequent, short one-to-ones and team calls with a purpose – build in deliberate inclusion and social connection, and trust people with autonomy while keeping accountability for outputs – behaviours developed as a leadership topic in their own right in Chapter 2. None of this can be automated, which is exactly why the syllabus calls leadership the area of a manager’s work least susceptible to automation.

8 Teams and committees

Finally, two types of formal group compared:

• Teams are deliberately formed with specific – usually practical – objectives: implement the IT system, design the profit-related pay scheme, decide whether to outsource distribution. They bring together mixed skills and have a definite leader.

• Committees are also formal and deliberately created, with defined areas or tasks – but they plan, discuss and decide rather than carry out the work themselves. Members are drawn from different departments so information and viewpoints are shared; decisions are formally recorded in minutes; and instead of a leader there is a chairperson (or simply ‘chair’), whose job is to co-ordinate – to see that everyone is heard and a balanced conclusion reached – rather than to give orders. After a committee reports, a team is often formed to implement its decision.

9 Test your knowledge

Two quick checks before you move on: run the flashcards to fix this chapter’s definitions and frameworks in mind, then attempt the ten objective questions to see whether you can apply them.