Possible problems with teams and how to overcome them

As we have already spoken about - teams are not always necessary within an organisation, and sometimes the task just does not require it. We have also looked at the fact that teams go through stages of development and this can be very unproductive too. Here are some other reasons why teams are not always the solution to all organisational problems.

Teams and 'quality' decision making

The Ringelman effect

Social loafing

Group norms

Risky shift phenomenon

Groupthink

Teams and 'quality' decision making

Miner (1984) argues that teams make average but not better decisions than individuals, and further research has indicated that the quality of work group decisions is consistently below that made by the most capable individual members (Rogelberg et al, 1992); whilst Michaelson et al (1989) argue that team results are often more accurate, but take far longer for decisions to be reached (Vroom & Yetton, 1973).

Audio: Decision making in teams

(22 seconds)
Download a transcript of this audio/recording

3D Full Spectrum Unity Holding Hands Concept by Scott Maxwell from Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

The Ringelman effect

According to Ringelman (1913), individual effort tends to decrease as the group size increases. This has become known as the Ringelman Effect or Social Loafing.

Research has revealed that social loafing is most likely to occur when:

the task is perceived as boring, unimportant, or simple;
team members perceive that their individual effort will not be identifiable;
the nature of each person's contribution was similar to others;
team members actually expected their colleagues to loaf.

Audio: Ringelman effect

(47 seconds)
Download a transcript of this audio/recording

Working Together Teamwork Puzzle Concept by Scott Maxwell from Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Social loafing

In order to avoid social loafing, Greenberg and Baron (1997) suggest:

making the work more involving;
if people are interested then they are more likely to remain engaged;
identifying individual workers;
if individual work can be identified, it stops people from being able to hide in generic task results;
rewarding contributions to the team;
rewarding an individual's ability to help other team members meet their goal, not just their own contribution;
threatened punishment;
that fear of being punished generally results in improved performance.

Group norms

When individuals are assigned to work together, for whatever task, they establish expected modes of behaviour and beliefs both formally and informally. These are known as Group Norms, and they tend to guide individual members to behave in a particular way, as they want to 'fit-in' and feel as if they belong. There have been a variety of interpretations for how and why these norms develop.

Individual members can yield to group pressure to conform to group norms, in three main ways (Asch, 1956):

(hover over the headings for more info)

Distortion of perception

Distortion of judgement

Distortion of action