Leading Team Building, Managing Group Dynamics and Diversity

Leading Team Building,
Managing Group Dynamics

and Diversity
Leadership competencies development for
innovation and entrepreneurship
How top managers add value to innovation and
entrepreneurship
• Four different roles that CEOs can adopt regarding innovation:
• The Innovation Strategist: The strategist is the CEO thinking about
strategy
• The Innovation Sponsor: The sponsor is the CEO who not only
supports innovation with ideas but also commits resources to it.
• The Innovation Architect: The architect is the CEO who organizes for
innovation.
• The Innovation Evangelist: The evangelist is the CEO who includes
innovation in the firm’s mission and values
How top managers add value to innovation and
entrepreneurship
• How can a CEO support IEC development? The CIPS framework
presented here is consistent with the CEOs’ functions. CEOs should
help develop leadership competencies for innovation and
entrepreneurship in four ways or key areas
• Context
• Ideas
• People
• Structure and systems
Leading Team Building,
Managing Group Dynamics and
Diversity
• https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/5
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• the recent trend toward more fluid team structures
• three criteria for team effectiveness
• most common barriers to achieving effectiveness—the hidden traps
that undermine our best attempts at successful teams
• detailed framework that answers this question by focusing on three
core leadership levers: team design, team launch, and team process
THE RECENT TREND TOWARD MORE
FLUID TEAM STRUCTURES
• Once upon a time, defining teams was straightforward because a
traditional team was easy to recognize: a bounded and stable set of
individuals interdependently working for a common purpose.
• Much like sports teams, traditional teams were typically created by a
manager who defined the team’s objectives and assigned and
supervised its members. Project teams, task forces, executive
committees, top management teams, or even MBA learning teams
are quintessential examples.
• Teams can be geographically distributed and therefore virtually (not
physically) bounded; for example, a marketing team for a
multinational corporation bringing out a new product line in several
different countries must coordinate its efforts across different time
zones and even languages, communicating about a unified
international marketing campaign while adapting to country specifics.
• Team membership may be fluid over time as individuals come and go
for different stages of a team’s work with only the team’s roles
remaining stable;
• for example, individual doctors, nurses, and other health-care
workers on patient-care teams in hospitals vary with frequent shift
changes, yet they must consistently work interdependently to provide
high-quality care without time for the individuals to get to know each
other
• Teamwork may even be completed in unbounded, open-source virtual
environments—for example, Wikipedia, or Top Coder —where team
members’ participation can be simply a commit to the code,
connecting their work with others on the team and interacting only
intermittently online, if at all
• these nontraditional teams are called as 4-D teams because they are
more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic.
• People still team (a verb), but the team (a noun) itself becomes
harder to pinpoint.
• https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/5
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THREE CRITERIA FOR TEAM
EFFECTIVENESS
• The team successfully delivers
• The team adapts and learns through effective teamwork
• Individual team members are satisfied and learn
MOST COMMON BARRIERS TO
ACHIEVING EFFECTIVENESS—THE
HIDDEN TRAPS THAT UNDERMINE OUR
BEST ATTEMPTS AT SUCCESSFUL TEAMS
• First, since delivering the desired output to stakeholders is key to
effectiveness, the simplest way to set up a team for failure is to
ask the team to deliver results it is unqualified or unable to
achieve.
• If a team’s capabilities, authority, and resources are insufficient to
produce its required output, the team is predisposed to poor
performance and frustration. Equally dangerous is setting unclear
goals so that the team does not know precisely what to deliver.
• Second, the process of teamwork matters. Teaming
promises a number of effort and knowledge-based
process gains, which make a team operate better than
the sum of its parts. But teaming can also suffer from
process losses.
• A process gain (plus) causes the team to perform
better than the sum of individual outcomes; a process
loss (minus) causes the team to perform more poorly
a. Team Process Gains
• Increased motivation
• Working as a team stimulates and encourages better performance due to heightened engagement, peer pressure,
and observation.
• Collective climate
• Emergence of positive feelings of “groupiness” (what academics call entitativity, or identification with the group as a
whole) and sharpened focus on agreed-upon priorities (e.g., innovation, service, safety, etc.) may enhance
performance.
• Increased knowledge
• Team has more information, expertise, and skills than any individual member and may collectively use them to
innovate or problem solve in ways that the original, individual holders could not.
• More objective evaluation
• Team can catch errors or anticipate problems better than individuals.
• Role modeling
• Members learn from and imitate more skilled members and their acts of leadership.
• Shared mental models/Transactive memory
• Shared cognitive maps and collective memory enable efficient organization, task allocation, and knowledge
acquisition.
b. Team Process Losses
• Free riding
• Opportunity to sit back and let others do the work (social loafing) can reduce motivation to
• perform.
• Coordination problems
• Difficulty integrating members’ contributions can lead to incomplete discussions and
premature decisions or, alternatively, dysfunctional cycling in trying to reach a decision.
• Social facilitation
• Perceived risk of being wrong in front of peers may cause members’ performance on tasks
that require experimentation and unpracticed behavior to suffer.
• Dysfunctional conflict and faultlines
• Politicized subgroups lose sight of the overarching goal of the group and instead push their
own agendas.
•
• Failure to surface all ideas and information
• Members do not adequately share new information that they would share in a
nonteam context due to:
• Self-censorship: Members privately decide their information is less original, relevant, or
important than information already shared by others; or
• Information overload: Members forget their own information has not been shared or stop
generating new ideas because they are focused on listening to others.
• Poor allocation of airtime
• Domination by one or more members skews discussion, invites power struggles,
overwhelms potential acts of leadership by less dominant members, and can
waste time by sidetracking the team.
• Premature consensus
• Overriding desire for harmony or conformity in the team (groupthink), evaluation
apprehension, social fear, or similar biases can prevent people from speaking up,
leading to incomplete analysis of the problems at hand.
• A third common path to team failure is to neglect the
emotional and relational aspects of the team by
overemphasizing the cognitive team experience.
Difficult personalities, emotional conflict, or poor
communication are only a few of the affective
obstacles that can trip up a team
Focus on three core leadership levers: team
design, team launch, and team process
1. Team Design
• The most basic determinants of team effectiveness will
be decided by its design—the why (a compelling team
purpose), who (the right team composition), what (an
appropriate team structure and role design), when (a
reasonable team timeline), and how (the alignment of
team rewards and proper access to resources).
Establishing Compelling Team Purpose (why)
Types of Team Purpose
Team Composition (who)
• Thoughtful leaders assemble or recruit team members who supply
traits and competencies across several different dimensions.
• Team Size
• Member Selection
• Group Dynamics and Diversity
• Social Sensitivity
• Familiarity
Effect of Group Size
on Productivity
Member Selection: Group Dynamics and Diversity
• Dimensions—expertise, background, network, demographics, capabilities, opinions, values,

personalities, preferences
• Celebrate the benefits of informational diversity
• Set enabling norms to support diversity.
• Manage subgroups (either formal or informal)
• tendencies toward homophily; that is, they prefer to establish ties with individuals who have
something in common with them, thereby forming subgroups around one or more similar
attributes such as demographics, preferences, skills, personality, or values.
• Resulting faultlines, or rifts between two distinct, nonoverlapping subgroups,
• Team members with similarities can more easily stimulate feelings of team psychological safety,
• On the other hand, subgroup members may begin to share information only within their own
subgroup rather than with the broader team, leading to factions and team conflict.
Member Selection: Group Dynamics and Diversity
• For example, some members’ lack of fluency in the team’s dominant language
can lead others to underestimate their competence
• Major cultural differences
• The following cultural differences can cause destructive conflicts in a team
• Direct versus indirect communication.
• Direct versus indirect communication. Some team members use direct,
explicit communication while others are indirect, for example, asking
questions instead of pointing out problems with a project. When
members see such differences as violations of their culture’s
communication norms, relationships can suffer
• Trouble with accents and fluency. Members who aren’t fluent in the
team’s dominant language may have difficulty communicating their
knowledge. This can prevent the team from using their expertise and
create frustration or perceptions of incompetence.
• Differing attitudes toward hierarchy. Team members from hierarchical
cultures expect to be treated differently according to their status in the
organization. Members from egalitarian cultures do not. Failure of some
members to honor those expectations can cause humiliation or loss of
stature and credibility.
• Conflicting decision-making norms. Members vary in how quickly they
make decisions and in how much analysis they require beforehand.
Someone who prefers making decisions quickly may grow frustrated with
those who need more time.
Member Selection: Social Sensitivity
• collective intelligence (“c”): A battery of tests, completed early in a team’s life,
that measure a team’s capacity for logical analysis, brainstorming, coordination,
planning, and moral reasoning, can predict future team performance on a wide
variety of future tasks (just as IQ tests are intended to predict an individual’s
performance on a wide variety of future tasks). What defines “c”? Interestingly, it
is not strongly correlated with the IQ of individual members of the team or other
personality traits but instead increases with three measurable team-level
attributes:
• Team members’ average social sensitivity (ability to read emotions in another
person’s face)
• Equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking
• Proportion of women on the team
• https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_
the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html
Member Selection: Familiarity
• If possible, selecting team members who share prior positive
experiences working together may provide a team with a head start.
• Not only are team members already aware of “who knows what,” but
they also typically demonstrate more willingness to engage in
relationships, coordination, and knowledge sharing from the very
start.
• Familiarity also may encourage an immediate sense of psychological
safety and trust among new team members.
What: Team Structure and Role Design
• Nature of Roles
• One important way teams may create a division of labor for learning,
remembering, and communicating team knowledge is through a so-
called transactive memory system (TMS)—essentially a shared mental
map, built through team interaction, of where knowledge resides.
• Content of Roles
• Role Representation
When: Team Lifespan
• Teams are partially identified by the length of their intended lifespan.
Some teams seem to have no planned endpoint; others, like the
temporary teams mentioned above, last only as long as the
individuals involved share responsibility for the (short- term)
outcome. Timelines are closely tied to individual responsibilities and
accountability, so teams should try to be explicit about timelines,
even if they may change. Mutual awareness of a shared timeline can
be important for effectiveness: Ideal team design and practices may
be very different for an emergency room team that lasts for one shift
than for an executive team that may spend years together.
How: Aligned Team Rewards and Resources
• Two of the most important functions served by the larger organization
or environment in which a team operates are determining how the
team will be rewarded and providing access to resources beyond the
team’s boundaries.
2 Team Launch
a. Approaches to Team Launch
• There are many approaches to leading a team launch. At PepsiCo, team launch is also a
carefully choreographed process that includes: (1) identifying and highlighting the core
capabilities that each member will bring; (2) articulating the team purpose and inviting
responses from team members; (3) creating a sense of shared identity; (4) identifying
the resources the team will need for success and the approach to acquiring them; and
(5) putting the norms and expectations for members on the table for the team to
revise and ratify.
b. “Clicking” at Launch: Collective Intelligence and

Communication Patterns
3 Team Process Management
• Managing Awareness of Team Process and Progress
• Monitoring and Adjusting Balance
• Balance Process and Outcome
• Balance Internal Dynamics and External Context
• Balance Exploration and Execution
• Intervening
What to do??
• To get the team moving again, intervention may solve the problem
however, avoid intervening directly
• Choose one of indirect interventions.
The Secrets of Great Teamwork
• Refer to HBR Reading The Secrets of Great Teamwork

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Leading Team Building,

Managing Group Dynamics

• Dimensions—expertise, background, network, demographics, capabilities, opinions, values,

b. “Clicking” at Launch: Collective Intelligence and

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