Teams look to collective competence
by Tim Mills Research Fellow in Strategic Human Resource Management
and Shaun Tyson Professor of Human Resource Management
As team working in business becomes increasingly important, so does the need to reach
an organisational understanding of team competence. Latest research indicates that team
competence is more than simply the sum of the individual competencies of the team
members, indicating the need to shift the emphasis from the individuals who make up the
team to include the team itself.
Most of us work in teams and spend much of our time discussing team performance. We
work with different teams, we move in and out of project teams and work in customer
service roles. As members of management teams, we work towards common goals, often
in a competitive environment. When we are not working in teams, we are commenting on
the performance of others - national or club football teams, the England cricket team, our
management teams or government teams, all provide a source of endless fascination.
There is a whole academic literature devoted to the study of high performing teams. One
approach is to study the individuals who comprise the team - as exemplified by Meredith
Belbin’s famous ‘team roles’ analysis which argued that the most effective teams are
those that contain a balance of individuals who can fill important team roles.
Competencies that are important for effective team working have also been studied. Good
communication skills are an obvious asset for any team member. This notion of
competency, however, like the focus on team roles, often occurs at the level of the
individual team members. Implicit in this approach is the notion that high performance
comes about through the summing of individual members’ competencies.
A different approach to team competence has been taken by researchers from the Human
Resource Research Centre at the Cranfield School of Management. In an ongoing study,
in collaboration with Crane Davies Management Consultants, these researchers, led by
Professor Shaun Tyson, have focused their attention at the level of collective competence.
This approach differs from those mentioned previously because it assumes that high team
performance emerges from the collective processes operating within the team. Team
competence, therefore, is more than simply the sum of the individual competencies of the
team members.
Clearly, there are many different types of teams. In the first stages of this research
project, teams from both business and non-business environments were studied to try to
capture both the differences and similarities in collective competence. Data using a
variety of research methods were collected from senior managers, footballers, project
managers, jazz musicians and virtual team members. This rich source of information was
then carefully analysed to create a putative model that describes a number of collective
team competencies.
But is it really legitimate to compare footballers with senior managers? Is what they do so
different as to make comparisons pointless? The researchers believe comparisons can be
made given certain considerations. They suggest, backed up by other research, that all
teams can be described in terms of certain underlying structural characteristics. For
example, any team by definition faces a collective task and the level to which this task is
prescribed is likely to determine the type of team processes that are important.
Consider a rowing team: eight rowers who are required to pull together in harmony. High
performance for them is unlikely to be enhanced, for instance, by creativity. Jazz groups,
on the other hand, define high performance in terms of creativity. For them, the task they
face is less structurally determined at the outset. Thus, the type of team process that is
important for success is partly determined by this task structure. For one team creativity
on task is a necessity, whereas for the other it would be a disaster.
Similarly, teams can exhibit different levels of stability. Some teams may work together
over an extended period - football teams, for example, are relatively stable. A common
allegation made against numerous England team managers in the past is that they have
failed to produce a settled side. This complaint recognises the importance of allowing
players to develop an understanding of their team-mates so that they may develop ways
of playing together successfully. For football teams it is important that stability is allowed
to facilitate collective competence.
Other teams, however, are not afforded this luxury. Take the virtual team in business team members may be thrown together at very short notice from the four corners of the
earth. Given a one-off project, these teams are expected to perform successfully from day
one. This lack of team stability is likely, in part, to determine those processes that will
enable collective success.
Communication - a core collective competence
The teams chosen for study in this project provided a range of team stability and task
structure. The early findings suggest that many team competencies are core to all teams.
The team-task environment seems to determine the processes by which these
competencies are achieved, rather than simply to define which competencies are required.
Let us consider communicating - a competency the researchers consider is a core
collective competence. Stable teams find ways of achieving competent communication
over time. Footballers work on set plays - through practice they develop what they
perceive as a sixth sense concerning the way they read a team-mate’s intentions.
Psychologists would describe this perception as the result of cognitive processing at an
automated level, possible because of the learning opportunities the training ground
environment affords them.
Unstable teams, like jazz groups, can’t develop such processes within the team. They
often come together for one-off performances and they literally have to bring
communication knowledge to the party. This is achieved by the jazz community
developing a commonly understood set of generic communication patterns through time
spent working with particular individuals, or years of practising with like-minded players
in jazz dives. It is the level of stability that defines the process by which the competency
is achieved for both footballers and jazz musicians.
Communicating is just one of around seventeen collective competencies that currently
make up the team competency model. Much of the research into management, project
and virtual teams has revealed commonalities with non-business teams. The collective
competencies that have emerged can be clustered according to whether they contribute to
the psychological environment within which the team operates, or directly to the
successful facilitation of the task.
Assessing team competence
The next stage of the project will be a survey to validate the model. The researchers
intend to sample approximately 1000 team members, predominantly from business
environments. This survey data will allow for the kind of rigorous statistical analyses
required to confirm the accuracy of the initial findings. An exciting spin off from the
validation phase of this project will be a new Team Competency Assessment
Questionnaire which will enable teams to assess their collective strengths and
weaknesses. Reliable information relating to a team’s collective competence would prove
invaluable for any team development programme. Along with highlighting areas of
weakness, the instrument would provide a metric that could be used to chart a team’s
progress.
The notion of individual competencies is accepted as an invaluable tool for integrating
many aspects of an organisation’s HR function. From recruitment and selection, through
appraisal and on to rewards, competencies provide the framework upon which to
structure understanding of individual performance. Team working is becoming
increasingly important to many organisations as the benefits become apparent. It is vital
that an organisational understanding of collective or team competence is reached if these
benefits are to be fully obtained. To achieve this the researchers believe it is important to
shift the emphasis from the individuals who make up the team to include the team itself.
For further information about the research, or to take part in the survey stage of the study,
please contact Tim Mills at Cranfield School of Management,
e-mail: t.i.mills@cranfield.ac.uk or telephone: 01234 751122.