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The conditions that foster team effectiveness are simple and seemingly straightforward to put in place. A real team with work that lends itself to teamwork. A clear and engaging direction. A group structure—task, composition, and norms—that promotes competent teamwork. Team-friendly reward, educational, and information systems. And some coaching to help team members take advantage of their favorable performance circumstances. Yet to install these simple conditions is also to determine the answers to four fundamental questions about how an enterprise operates:
1. Who decides? Who has the right to make decisions about how the work will be carried out, and to determine how problems that develop will be resolved?
2. Who is responsible? Where do responsibility and accountability for performance outcomes ultimately reside?
3. Who gains? How are monetary rewards allocated among the individuals and groups that helped generate them?
4. Who learns? How are opportunities for learning, growth, and career advancement distributed among organization members?
The answers to these four questions express some of the core values of any enterprise, and it can be maddeningly hard to change them. For one thing, to change the answers to the four questions is almost certain to threaten the turf and personal interests of currently powerful organizational actors. These individuals are therefore likely to find lots of good reasons why it would be ill-advised or excessively risky to alter standard ways of operating. Moreover, the answers to the four questions are, in established organizations, supported by deeply rooted institutional structures...Share
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