Team Design Characteristics

Abstract

Teams are a basic building block of organizations. Over the past twenty-five years, a great deal of research has focused on what can be done to improve team effectiveness. Team design characteristics represent inputs that can be manipulated by organizational leaders and can be grouped into three broad classifications: Team Composition, Team Task Design Characteristics, and Team Leadership. The first team design characteristic—composition—focuses on the attributes of individuals who are team members and is generally captured either as the average standing on a particular trait such as mental ability or as a pattern of a characteristic such as the variability in team member conscientiousness. Teams composed of members with desirable traits generally outperform teams composed of members who do not possess desirable individual characteristics. Members with negative individual characteristics harm cooperation and are often rejected by teammates. The impact of some team members—frequently labeled the strategic core—is, however, greater than the impact of others. Team Member Diversity of individual characteristics also corresponds with team processes and outcomes, although the effect is positive in some instances and negative in others. A particularly difficult methodological issue associated with team composition research concerns missing data that occurs when some team members fail to complete survey measures. The second team design feature—team task characteristics—arises from the work itself and how the team accomplishes its prescribed tasks. Some teams have a high level of collective autonomy whereas others work under strict hierarchical control. Teams vary in interdependence with some operating such that members work together very closely and others allowing members to work primarily as individuals. Differences in reward structure also vary from teams that are rewarded collectively to teams with individual-based rewards that result in some members being rewarded more than others. Moreover, an increasingly important task feature of teams is the degree of virtuality, with some teams interacting primarily face-to-face and others interacting mostly through electronic means. The third team design feature is leadership. Teams are facilitated by Empowering Leadership that encourages the team to collectively lead itself, by Shared Leadership that exists when leadership functions are dispersed throughout the team, and by Transformational Leadership that provides teams with a vision that transcends individual interests.