Transcript Team skills - profcraigarmstrong

Team skills for business planning
Foundations of Entrepreneurship
Cooperative versus competitive
relations in teams
Cooperative relations in teams
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Effective communication occurs
Friendliness, helpfulness, and less obstructiveness are
expressed in discussions.
Coordination of effort, divisions of labor, orientation to task
achievement, high productivity, and orderliness in discussions
Feelings of agreement with the ideas of others and a sense of
basic similarity in beliefs and values
Willingness to enhance the power of others in the team to
accomplish the others’ goals
Defining conflicting interests as a mutual problem to be solved
by collaborative effort
Competitive relations in teams
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Communication is impaired as the conflicting parties seek to
gain advantage by misleading the other through use of false
promises, ingratiation tactics, and disinformation.
Obstructiveness and lack of helpfulness lead to mutual negative
attitudes and suspicion of one another’s intentions.
Inability to divide work and/or duplicating one another’s efforts
The repeated experience of disagreement and critical rejection
of ideas reduces confidence in oneself and the other.
The conflicting team members seek to enhance their own power
and to reduce the power of the others. Any increase in the
power of the other is seen as a threat.
Social loafing
Social loafing is the reduction in
individual effort when individuals
work together on a collective task
compared to when they work on an
individual task.
The ballad of collective tasks
• “I may have to work harder than others for the
same rewards.”
• “I may have to work hard than others with the
same job.”
• “I may have to work with slower others and have
to pull their weight on top of my own.”
• “Maybe other team members will not work as hard
as I.”
• “Not everybody may do his or her fair share of the
workload.”
• “I may become stuck with a bunch of losers who
can’t pull their own weight.”
What causes social loafing?
Variables that influence social
loafing
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Evaluation potential
Task value
Group value
Redundancy
Group size
Expectations about others
Contingency between individual and team
performance
Evaluation potential
• Individuals tend to loaf less when their contributions
can be evaluated
• When individual contributions can’t be distinguished
from those of others, group members can hide in a
team
• When team members’ contributions are not identifiable
and assessable, the tendency to loaf increases. Why?
Because this condition decreases the instrumentality of
contributions
• Solution: Use peer appraisals. Being evaluated causes
social loafing to decline, regardless of whether the
evaluation is positive or negative.
Task value
• Group members tend to loaf less when task value
increases.
• This means that a task that is pleasant, important,
or significant decreases the tendency to loaf.
• High task value leads to high task outcome;
executing the task is in itself a valuable outcome.
• Working on tasks becomes more unpleasant as
fatigue increases. Don’t wear yourself out!
Group tasks
• Individuals tend to loaf less when group
value increases.
• High group cohesion or a strong group
identity can reduce social loafing.
• A team consisting of people who have
known each other for a while and who have
similar values will have less social loafing
problems than teams consisting of strangers.
Redundancy
• The more redundant the contribution of an
individual is, the more the individual will be
inclined to loaf.
• Having a unique contribution to the team effort
reduces the tendency to loaf. If each team member
has a unique contribution to give to the team, then
redundancy is minimized and the tendency to loaf
is likewise minimized.
• When team members are interchangeable there is a
greater likelihood of loafing.
Group size
• The tendency to loaf is smaller in small
groups than in large groups
• A smaller group leads to higher perceived
instrumentality; the valued outcomes have a
lower chance of happening if not everyone
contributes.
Expectations about others
• Individuals are less likely to loaf when they expect
other team members to perform badly
• At the same time, teammates of individuals who
explicitly announce that they plan to work hard
will tend to loaf
• Low expectations about the performance of others
lead to high perceived instrumentality because
one’s own contributions become more necessary
to attain the valued outcome