Marks Et Al. (2001) PDF
Marks Et Al. (2001) PDF
Marks Et Al. (2001) PDF
Much of the work in organizations is completed through teamwork: people working together to achieve something beyond the capabilities of individuals working alone. Success is
not only a function of team members' talents
and the available resources but also the processes team members use to interact with each
other to accomplish the work. Understanding the
processes that employees use to work together
in teams will enable organizations to retool human resource systems and managers to select,
train, develop, and reward personnel for effective teamwork.
The realization that process plays a pivotal
role in team performance has led to a proliferation of team studies in applied settings and research laboratories in the past twenty years.
During this time, there has been increased attention on developing theoretical models of
team effectiveness, with team processes occupying a central role (e.g., Gist, Locke, & Taylor,
1987; Guzzo & Shea, 1992; Hackman, 1983). In
these models researchers generally have
adopted an input-process-outcome (I-P-O)
framework. They view processes as mediating
mechanisms linking such variables as member,
team, and organizational characteristics with
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into three liigher-level categories, distinguishable on the basis of time (relatively speaking)
and content domain. This taxonomy is wed to
the time-based model that we advance and
grounded heavily in prior work in this area. Finally, we provide recommendations for using
this taxonomy to further team process assessment in research and practice.
THE CONSTRUCT OF TEAM PROCESS
Our review of the literature featuring investigations or discussions of team process revealed
surprisingly few definitions of the construct, and
the ones provided typically were very general in
nature. For example, in a recent review of team
effectiveness research, Cohen and Bailey define
team process as "interactions such as communication and conflict that occur among group
members and external others" (1997: 244).
McGrath refers to team interaction process as
"patterned relations" among team members
(1984a: 11). Although these types of definitions
give readers a "feel" for what is meant by team
process, they are not specific enough to provide
clear guidance to researchers. We define team
process as membeis' inteidependent acts that
convert inputs to outcomes thTough cognitive,
verbal, and behavioral activities directed toward organizing taskwork to achieve collective
goals. Centrally, team process involves members' interacting with other members and their
task environment. Team processes are the
means by which members work interdependently to utilize various resources, such as expertise, equipment, and money, to yield meaningful outcomes (e.g., product development, rate
of work, team commitment, satisfaction).
We, as have others, distinguish team processes from taskwork, defined as "a team's interactions with tasks, tools, machines, and systems" (Bowers, Braun, & Morgan, 1997: 90).
Taskwork represents what it is that teams are
doing, whereas teamwork describes how they
are doing it with each other. Taskwork is critical
to team effectiveness and depends heavily on
member competence as well as team processes.
Team processes are used to direct, align, and
monitor taskwork. Of course, this distinction
may become blurry in practice, but our focus
here is on the team processes that enable teams
to orchestrate taskwork activities for goal accomplishment.
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Even with general agreement on the conceptual meaning of team process, widespread concerns exist regarding the selection and operationalization of process variables for use in
research. One particular problem that has
slowed the progression of the team process literature is the diversity of variables that have
been selected as "processes" in tests of I-P-O
relationships. For example, variables such as
collective efficacy, potency, cohesion, and situational awareness have been used frequently to
represent process. We submit that these types of
constructs do not denote interaction processes
but, instead, tap qualities of a team that represent member attitudes, values, cognitions, and
motivations. We prefer to call these types of
variables "emergent states": constructs that
characterize properties of the team that are typically dynamic in nature and vary as a function
of team context, inputs, processes, and outcomes.
Emergent states describe cognitive, motivational, and affective states of teams, as opposed
to the nature of their member interaction. Al-
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weaken its salience to the team, given the myriad of demands the team faces.
Up to this point we have discussed performance episodes as though teams pursue just
one of them at a time. However, virtually all
present-day work teams have to multitask in
order to manage several performance episodes
simultaneously (McGrath, 1991). Consequently,
they often work in multiple performance episodes at a given point in time, each with its
constituent subgoals and episodes and with its
associated rhythms and sequence. Just as teams
need to break down and sequence subepisode
accomplishments, they must orchestrate multiple episode interfaces. Moreover, the timing and
duration of these episodes may often differ
markedly and cause even greater coordination
demands. The primary challenge is for teams to
develop and execute a multifaceted plan of
work that simultaneously manages performance gaps in each of their important performance episodes.
The complexities described above are handled by a host of team processes. First, there is a
premium on understanding the larger work environment within which the team is operating,
developing appropriate strategies and contingency plans, and specifying clear goals during
transition phases. The role of communication is
heightened, especially during periods when
members need to coordinate actions and to monitor the environment and the team's progress.
Pressures and demands inevitably lead to confusion and conflict among members and can
erode their motivation, confidence, and morale.
Processes are the means by which teams manage all of these concerns during multiepisodic
goal accomplishment. The types of processes
that occur differ, in part, because of the particular activities that are being conducted at any
given time during a performance episode.
We now turn to a discussion of a model that
explains what types of processes are more likely
to occur at different periods within performance
episodes.
Recurring Phase Model of Team Processes
We introduce the notion of a recurring phase
model of team processes to delineate the role of
process in performance episodes. We submit
that, over time, team performance is best viewed
as a series of related I-P-O episodes. We assert
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FIGURE 1
The Rhythm of Team Task Accomplishment
T "^ P
Taskl
~^ O
Transition
Action
Transition
T "^ P
Task 2
Task 3
Transition
Action
i
^
i.
Action
Transition
y
Task 4
Action
-'o
Transition
I-^Pl-N-^O
"^ O
Transition
i-^P
I-^Pl-N-^ O
I-^Pi...N-> 0
Transition
Action
Transition
Time
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processes are likely to be most salient. We further submit that because the timing and rhythm
of these episodes are somewhat arbitrary and
idiosyncratic, a thorough team task analysis
(Bowers, Baker, & Salas, 1994) is required to
identify them. In the following sections we discuss the specific nature of the processes that
occur during transition and action phases of
team functioning.
TAXONOMY OF TEAM PROCESSES
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TABLE 1
Taxonomy of Team Processes
Process Dimensions
Definition
Goal specification
Strategy
formulation
Systems
monitoring
Team monitoring
and backup
behavior
Coordination
Transition processes
Mission analysis
formulation and
planning
Action processes
Monitoring
progress toward
goals
Interpersonal processes
Preemptive conflict management involves establishing
Conflict
management
conditions to prevent, control, or guide team conflict
before it occurs. Reactive conflict management involves
working through task and interpersonal disagreements
among team members
Motivation and
confidence
building
Affect
management
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FIGURE 2
Manifestation of Processes in Transition and Action Phases
Transition phase
Action phase
Mission analysis
Goal specification
Systems monitoring
Coordination
I
Conflict management
I
Motivating and confidence building
I
Affect management
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Mission analysis. Mission analysis is the interpretation and evaluation of the team's mission, including identification of its main tasks as
well as the operative environmental conditions
and team resources available for mission execution. The process of interpreting a mission
within the given performance context occurs
cognitively, as team members interpret their
charge within the boundaries of team abilities,
resources, and time constraints. This process
also includes verbal discussion, to ensure that
all members have a shared vision of the team's
purpose and objectives. Mission analysis blends
two foci: backward evaluation and forward visioning. The backward visioning aspect includes diagnosing previous performance and
interpreting the causes of success and failure.
Previous research has revealed that to the extent that teams better understand the underlying causes of previous performance, they can
better prepare for future efforts (Blickensderfer,
Cannon-Bowers, & Salas, 1997). The forward visioning aspect of mission analysis concerns
how the team interprets its charge for the future
in the context of ongoing events. Teams that fail
to conduct thorough mission analyses will be
undermined by changing circumstances or relegated to operating in a purely reactive mode.
Worse yet, teams that abbreviate or omit mission analysis activities run the risk of misguiding their attention and efforts until it is too late
to recover (Gersick, 1988).
Goal specification. Goal specification refers
to the identification and prioritization of goals
and subgoals for mission accomplishment. This
is the process that teams go through to develop
and assign overall mission goals and subgoals
that indicate what and how much must be accomplished by a specified time and within certain quality standards. For instance, a snow removal team might set a goal of plowing 100
percent of the highways and 50 percent of the
neighborhood streets in the county by the end of
the day. This process usually occurs during transition phases and in conjunction with mission
analysis and strategy development. Ideally,
goals are aligned with strategies, and timelines
are associated with mission accomplishment.
However, goals might also have to be specified
(or respecified) during action phases because of
a team's inability to fully anticipate all situational contingencies. For example, a snow removal team may have to respecify its goals for
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the day if weather conditions change or equipment becomes unavailable (Tesluk & Mathieu,
1999).
Whereas effective goal specification leads to
challenging, attainable goals that are aligned
with the larger organizational vision and with
collective strategies, ineffective goal specification has debilitating effects on collective performance. Poorly conceptualized goals may be
overly general, vague, conflicting, ambiguous,
unattainable, impractical, or not valued by team
members. These types of goals do not stimulate
effective strategies, timelines, and collective activities for effective performance. A team that
disregards the goal specification stage entirely
ends up with no shared understanding of the
team's purpose.
Strategy formulation and planning. Strategy
formulation and planning refer to the development of alternative courses of action for mission
accomplishment. This involves decision making
about how team members will go about achieving their missions, discussion of expectations,
relay of task-related information, prioritization,
role assignment, and the communication of
plans to all team members (Hackman & Oldham,
1980; Stout, Cannon-Bowers, Salas, & Milanovich, 1999). Good strategy development includes
consideration of situational and time constraints, team resources, member expertise, and
the changing nature of the environment. The
resulting strategies contain information about
member roles and responsibilities, the order
and timing of actions, and how task-related activities should be executed. Poor strategy development occurs when teams are unable to develop plans for successful goal accomplishment.
This results in ineffective strategies (if there are
strategies in place at all) that force teams to rely
completely on past experience or improvise as
they perform, which can be exceedingly difficult
for complex and novel tasks.
We have further classified the strategy and
planning dimension into three subdimensions:
(1) deliberate planning, (2) contingency planning, and (3) reactive strategy adjustment. Deliberate planning refers to the formulation and
transmission of a principal course of action for
mission accomplishment. This is a chief activity
of transition periods occurring at the beginning
of episodes. For example, hotel catering teams
meet each afternoon to develop a strategy that
details the order in which next-day events will
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other team members so that decisions about appropriate responses can take place. Likewise,
pilot crews rely on extensive panels of instrumentation that must be checked regularly to detect flight problems.
Teams that work in less dynamic environments may set aside specific time periods for
monitoring internal and external environments
(e.g., surveys to assess buyer markets, weekly
meetings to review resource allocations for
projects). Poor systems monitoring is evidenced
in some teams by erroneous interpretation of
critical internal and environmental elements.
For example, failure to attend to a weather
storm warning might leave construction teams
exposed to dangerous elements.
Team monitoring and backup responses.
Team monitoring and backup is defined as assisting team members to perform their tasks,
which may occur by (1) providing a teammate
verbal feedback or coaching, (2) assisting a
teammate behaviorally in carrying out actions,
or (3) assuming and completing a task for a
teammate. This dimension includes the provision of feedback and task-related support and
the seeking of help from teammates when necessary. For team monitoring and backup to occur effectively, teammates need to be informed
of others' role assignments in order to identify
what type of assistance is required at a particular time. Often, team members watch out for
one another, render assistance when required,
and warn of possible problems or dangerous
circumstances. For instance, in an airplane
cockpit, copilots must stay abreast of the pilot's
actions in order to detect or compensate for critical lapses in judgment or oversight. A failure to
monitor teammates and to provide backup renders the entire team susceptible to a single
shortcoming. If teammates are not looking out
for, or willing to help out, each other, the team
will fail when any one member fails.
Team monitoring is primarily a cognitive operation in which team members observe the actions of their teammates and watch for errors or
performance discrepancies. When a team member identifies the need to provide help, backup
behavior in the form of suggestive or corrective
feedback (verbal and/or behavioral) is provided
to assist the team member and get performance
back on track (Dickinson & Mclntyre, 1997).
Coordination activities. We define coordination activities as the process of orchestrating the
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simultaneously manage multiple bundles of activities over time, researchers should think
about how teams allocate resources to multiple
tasks over performance episodes.
In the following sections we discuss more specifically the implications of the team process
framework and taxonomy for future process
measurement, new research, and practice.
Process Taxonomy As a Guide for
Process Measurement
We hope researchers will use the framework
and taxonomy to further refine future research
on team processes. Specifically, this work is intended to shape future conceptualization of both
the scope and boundaries of team process, as
well as to serve as a guide for measuring process constructs in forthcoming studies of team
effectiveness. Our hope is that this work will
provide researchers not only with guidance in
the selection of appropriate process variables
but with thoughts about how and when to measure them so that we can learn not only what but
when team processes influence team effectiveness. The framework and taxonomy can help
researchers with three critical issues that arise
when planning studies to capture teamwork
processes.
(1) What teamwork processes should be assessed? When the goal is to predict team effectiveness defined as performance quality and efficiency, transition and action processes should
be targeted, because they have the greatest potential to impact the rate and caliber of taskwork. Researchers interested in predicting team
outcomes such as product development time
and quality, decision accuracy, response time,
customer service quality, amount of sales, or
manufacturing errors might consider assessing
such transition processes as goal specification
and strategy formulation, as well as action processes like monitoring progress toward goals.
Those studying team tasks that require high
member interdependency could measure processes such as coordination and team monitoring and backup behavior (Tesluk et al., 1997),
because they describe, techniques that team
members use to synchronize each other's activities. Those interested in teams that operate
within complex, dynamic, and unpredictable environments might choose to focus more on such
dimensions as mission analysis, strategy devel-
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opment, and environmental monitoring, because these processes help teams to better understand both challenging and unstable
performance situations.
However, researchers who are primarily interested in predicting team effectiveness defined
as team longevity or satisfaction (Hackman &
Morris, 1975) should consider assessing interpersonal processes. Interpersonal processes are
more likely to influence team cohesion over
time, which is a primary antecedent of team
longevity and satisfaction. Thus, investigators
who want to explain team turnover rates, team
commitment, affect, efficacy, and satisfaction
might target such processes as conflict and affect management and confidence building.
The ten-dimension taxonomy also implies
that gaining a more complete understanding of
how processes contribute to team effectiveness
necessitates the measurement of more than one
process variable. However, we recognize that
measuring ten process dimensions is not often
practical or necessary. When the research goal
is to examine a broad range of processes, we
suggest representing each superordinate category (transition, action, and interpersonal) with
a process dimension most relevant to the research context. When the research goal is a targeted focus on a certain type of teamwork, measuring one or more dimensions within a
superordinate category is recommended. Researchers should evaluate the particular
tradeoffs between depth and breadth of process
measurement versus the added complexity in
research time and measurement. The taxonomy
can serve as a good starting point for consideration of what processes are most critical, salient, or challenging in a particular environment.
(2) What measurement strategy should be
employed? There is a variety of strategies available for process assessment (see Weingart, 1997,
for an excellent review). Studies in which researchers have examined multiple processes
typically have involved use of a single measurement strategy (e.g.. Campion, Medsker, & Higgs,
1993; Hyatt & Ruddy, 1997), either survey methodology or behavioral observation. However,
certain measurement strategies are more appropriate for some processes than others. For example, processes such as strategy formulation,
goal specification, coordination, and backup are
generally observable, lending themselves to the
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introduced here have implications for the structuring of teams, as well as the design and application of human resource management systems. Primarily, they bring to the forefront the
importance of considering how time impacts
teamwork and that various teamwork processes
are more and less likely to occur at different
points in the performance cycle. Thus, a logical
first step is to understand a team's temporal
rhythms and episodes and then to consider
what, when, and how teamwork processes contribute to critical performance outcomes.
To do so, we suggest conducting a traditional
team-level task analysis (Bowers et al., 1994)
embedded within a tempoial hamework in order to decipher team performance rhythms critical to goal accomplishment within a particular
team context, noting what behaviors and activities occur together during a single performance
episodein other words, tracking how teams
work together over time to obtain collective
goals. For example, a time-sensitive team task
analysis carried out for a certain company's retail sales teams might detail planning meetings
that occur primarily at the beginning of each
month, followed by periods of active customer
site visits and weekly progress and coordination
meetings. The focus of the planning meetings is
to develop goals, to analyze particular facets of
the environment that help them (e.g., strong
economy) or hinder them (e.g., competition), and
then to develop appropriate strategies to meet
those goals. Customer site visits require coordination, monitoring each other's customer loads,
and affect management when sales are not going well. This information, used alongside the
taxonomy, gives rise to a number of practical
applications regarding team feedback, performance appraisal, staffing, and training.
Team appraisals and feedback. The taxonomy
could also be used to conduct team process appraisals, where particular teams would be evaluated on their ability to conduct each of the
processes identified as critical by a team task
analysis. The resulting team process profile
would delineate teamwork strengths and weaknesses. This information could then be used to
provide teams with customized feedback and
interventions, as well as to identify specific developmental and training needs. For example,
rather than rely on generic team-building interventions as a universal solution for all processrelated problems, teams in constant discord can
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ability to motivate) of certain players to a baseball team's overall effectiveness. Teamwork profiles that delineate the range of processes that
occur across different episodes in the team goal
accomplishment cycle open the door to a host of
tailored training solutions for teamwork issues.
These solutions range from team-building interventions designed to foster interpersonal
processes to the use of technology (e.g., online
displays, communication software) that is implemented to remedy or enhance the teamwork
needs of particular teams in context (Bikson,
Cohen, & Mankin, 1999).
Further, consideration of the surrounding context in which teams perform uncovers a new set
of process taxonomy applications. For example,
teams that strategize in relatively stable and
predictable environments should be taught formal planning skills, whereas those that perform
in turbulent and unpredictable environments
should receive strategy training that emphasizes problem diagnosis and impromptu strategy adjustment.
In sum, our framework emphasizes two oftenpracticed strategies and also illustrates why
they are effective. First, creating a wellbalanced constellation of KSAs in the team,
whether accomplished through selection, placement, and/or training, creates an enabling condition whereby human resources are available
for the varied tasks at hand. Second, the move
toward self-directed or empowered teams suggests that the members themselves are perhaps
best positioned to align those talents to the
changing requirement dynamics over the course
of episodes. Shifting the orientation from looking for uniformly high "team work skills" to
managing team human resources as a constellation of talents should help to enable teams to
be successful throughout the changing pressures of performance episodes.
Conclusions
Despite McGrath's (1984b) call for the serious
study of team process, there is still no conceptual framework of team process, no agreed-upon
definition or set of process dimensions and challenges associated with its measurement. Here,
through the development of a conceptual framework of team processes as they relate to team
effectiveness, we have identified the content domain for team process. It includes ten lower-
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