Preface

Making the Team: A Guide for Managers

Preface to the New Edition

When I wrote Making the Team in 2000, my intent was to introduce leaders, managers, and executives to the practical research on groups and teams. This enterprise required an integration of theory, research, and application. Five professors—Dave Messick, Keith Murnighan, Mark Rittenberg, Brian Uzzi, and myself—offer a three-day course for executives in team leadership at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Moreover, Kellogg offers a full-term course on teamwork to our MBA students. This book is dedicated to the students of Kellogg’s executive program and MBA program.

The title of the book, Making the Team, has two audiences: Leaders and team members. For the leader, the book directs itself toward how teams can be designed to function optimally; for those people who are members of teams, the book focuses on the skills necessary to be a productive team member.

Since the publication of the first version, many advances have occurred in team and group research. Every chapter has been updated with new information, new research, updated examples, and more. Specifically, I have made three major changes to the revised version of Making the Team:

• New, updated research: True to the book’s defining characteristic—providing managers with the most up-to-date research in a digestible fashion—I have included the latest research on teamwork and group behavior, thus keeping the book up-to-date and true to its strong research focus and theory-driven approach. The updated research also reports on the survey database that we have collected at Kellogg for the past five years. The survey in the first edition reported the responses of 149 managers and executives; the database of this survey has more than tripled, with a current total of 497 responses. In addition, more than 275 new research studies have been cited.

• More case studies: I have included more examples and illustrations of effective (as well as ineffective) teamwork. More than 130 new case studies and examples of actual company teams have been added. As before, each chapter opens with an example of a real team. Many of the concepts and techniques in the chapters are supplemented with illustrations and examples from real teams, both contemporary and historical. I do not use these examples to prove a theory; rather, I use them to illustrate how many of the concepts in the book are borne out in real-world situations.

• Learning and development: Mostly due to my strong research interests in learning, I have put learning front-and-center in the new edition, with a special focus on how leaders can be in a continuous learning mode. For example, in chapter 1, I have expanded the team-building skills from two in the 2000 edition (accurate diagnosis and theory-based intervention) to three in the 2003 edition (accurate diagnosis, theory based intervention and expert learning).

In addition to the changes above, which affect all chapters and sections of the book, several chapters have undergone updates as new theory and research has broken ground and has our world has been shaped by events such as September 11th, 2001, and the rash of corporate fraud. For example, chapter 6 (“Team Decision Making”) now has a new section on decision making and ethics. In addition, all of the chapters have undergone a serious facelift. The revision was sparked not only by the advances—as well as calamities—in the corporate world, but even more so by the great scientific research on teamwork that my colleagues have relentlessly contributed to the field of management science in the past three years, since the first edition went to press.

One of the reasons why I love my work is because there are so many wonderful people with whom to collaborate. The following people have had a major impact on my thinking and have brought new joy and meaning to the word “collaboration”: Cameron Anderson, Linda Babcock, Max Bazerman, Terry Boles, Jeanne Brett, Susan Brodt, John Carroll, Hoon-Seok Choi, Jennifer Crocker, Gary Fine, Craig Fox, Adam Galinsky, Wendi Gardner, Dedre Gentner, Robert Gibbons, Kevin Gibson, James Gillespie, Rich Gonzalez, Deborah Gruenfeld, Reid Hastie, Andy Hoffman, Molly Kern, Peter Kim, Shirli Kopelman, Rod Kramer, Laura Kray, Terri Kurtzburg, John Levine, Allan Lind, George Loewenstein, Jeff Loewenstein, Denise Lewin Loyd, Beta Mannix, Kathleen McGinn, Vicki Medvec, Tanya Menon, Dave Messick, Terry Mitchell, Don Moore, Michael Morris, Keith Murnighan, Janice Nadler, Maggie Neale, Erika Petersen, Kathy Phillips, Robin Pinkley, Mark Rittenberg, Ashleigh Rosette, Ken Savitsky, Elizabeth Seeley, Vanessa Seiden, Marwan Sinaceur, Harris Sondak, Tom Tyler, Leaf Van Boven, Kimberly Wade-Benzoni, Laurie Weingart, and Judith White.

The revision of this book would not have been possible without the dedication, organization, and creativity of Rachel Claff, who created the layout, organized the information, edited the hundreds of drafts, mastered the figures, and researched many of the case studies for this book.

In this book, I talk quite a bit about the “power of the situation” and how strongly the environment shapes behavior. The Kellogg School of Management is one of the most supportive, dynamic environments that I have ever had the pleasure to be a part of. In particular, Dean Dipak Jain and Associate Deans David Besanko and Robert Magee have created an environment in which teaching and research are happily married and very productive. My colleagues across the Kellogg School are uniquely warm, constructive, and generous. Ken Bardach, Kellogg’s Dean of Excecutive Education, has been particuarly visionary in his development of programs on teamwork. Directing the KTAG (Kellogg Teams and Groups) Center and the Behavioral Laboratory has been a pleasure beyond compare. I am very grateful for the generous grants I have received through the years from the National Science Foundation’s Decision, Risk and Management program, the Kellogg Teams and Groups Center, and its sister, the Dispute Resolution Research Center.

This book is very much a team effort of the people I have mentioned here, whose talents are diverse, broad, and extraordinarily impressive. I am deeply indebted to my colleagues and students, and I feel very grateful that they have touched my life and this book.

Preface to the First Edition

When I first came to the Kellogg School of Management in 1995, there were only a small number of course offerings on group dynamics and teamwork. Sheer demand for more teamwork led to the development of a 3-day team-building program for executives. In this program, leading scholars—Deborah Gruenfeld, Dave Messick, Keith Murnighan, Brian Uzzi, and I—provide the latest team-building and management principles to managers and executives from different industries all over the globe. The participants are always as surprised as we are to see the commonality of concerns and interests regarding their teams. Most of the participants were hungry for a book that would pull together the basic and cutting-edge concepts they learned from the seminar. I searched for a book that would capture and supplement the broad and deep scope that this program reflected. Often, the popular book choices were not theory-based and the scholarly books not very practical. I set out to write a book that would do three things:

Provide an extremely engaging approach to teamwork by connecting models and theories with actual teams and companies.
Maintain a rigorous, cutting-edge research focus—all of the material in the book is produced by leading scholars in the field and represents hard science, in the strict sense of the word.
Provide a big-picture view of teamwork by giving the manager and team leader practical advice and solutions to problems.

Making the Team separates fact from fiction and outlines in a clear, step-by-step fashion how young managers, as well as seasoned executives, can improve the functioning of their teams. Each chapter opens with a case analysis of a real team. The reader of this book will learn how to diagnose the causes of team failure, conduct a performance evaluation of teams, leverage the team within the organization, determine effective leadership behavior, create opportunity from conflict, deal with global teamwork issues, set the stage for creative, breakthrough thinking in teams, reduce prejudice, and manage meetings and study groups for effective learning and decision making. In short, this book transforms the art of teamwork into a science to be studied and mastered.

I took the perspective of the manager when writing this book; arguably, I should have taken the perspective of the team. However, this choice was for expositional purposes, as all of the messages for the manager of the team apply to the team itself.

The 12 chapters are arranged into a sequence of three major sections: Part I covers the basics (types of teams, facts, and myths); part II covers internal dynamics of teamwork (building the team, collective intelligence, decision making, conflict, and creativity); and part III focuses on the external dynamics of teams in organizations (networking, leadership, interteam relations, and information technology).

The first chapter ("Teams in Organizations") lays out the basic concepts of the book and attempts to dispel some common myths about teamwork. It introduces the basic building blocks for analyzing and perfecting teamwork. Chapter 2 ("Performance and Productivity") tackles the question of how we know whether a team is performing well, and if not, what to do about it. Chapter 3 ("Rewarding Teamwork") deals with the question of rewarding teamwork in organizations, the impact of rewards on motivation and behavior, and the choices that organizations have in this regard.

Part II of the book focuses on the internal dynamics—or what is going on inside the team itself. Chapter 4 ("Building the Team") focuses on structuring tasks, selecting people, and fostering team relationships. Chapter 5 ("Sharpening the Team Mind") explores how teams communicate (and the most common reasons for failures), how teams process information, and how they create a collective team intelligence. Chapter 6 ("Team Decision Making") examines the four most common team decision-making pitfalls. It discusses the causes and consequences of conformity and how to deal with it. Chapter 7 ("Conflict in Teams") focuses on how to turn negative conflict into positive conflict for teams. Chapter 8 ("Creativity") examines how to design teams to be maximally creative.

Part III of the book focuses on external dynamics—or how the team fits in the organization. Chapter 9 ("Managing the External Environment") takes up the topics of team boundaries, interteam relations, networking, and boundary spanning. Chapter 10 ("Leadership") focuses on the dual tasks of effective leadership: Dealing with internal dynamics as well as external dynamics. Chapter 11 ("Interteam Relations") focuses on the issues of conflict and competition between teams in the organization. Chapter 12 ("Teamwork via Information Technology") examines the impact of information technology on global, as well as local, teamwork and some of the choices the manager has for maintaining high productivity.

I also included four appendices that the managers, executives, and students I have worked with told me they wanted to see in this book. Appendix 1 focuses on how to run a meeting. Appendix 2 contains tips for consultants and facilitators of meetings. Appendix 3 focuses on how to build and maintain an effective study group. Appendix 4 contains examples of 360-degree evaluations.

The research and ideas in this book come from an invaluable set of scholars in the fields of social psychology, organizational behavior, sociology, and cognitive psychology. During the past 12 years, my life has been enriched in very important ways by the following people with whom I have collaborated: Linda Babcock, Max Bazerman, Terry Boles, Jeanne Brett, Susan Brodt, Gary Fine, Craig Fox, Dedre Gentner, Robert Gibbons, Kevin Gibson, Rich Gonzalez, Deborah Gruenfeld, Reid Hastie, Peter Kim, Shirli Kopelman, Rod Kramer, Laura Kray, Terri Kurtzburg, John Levine, Allan Lind, Jeff Loewenstein, Beta Mannix, Vicki Medvec, Dave Messick, Terry Mitchell, Don Moore, Michael Morris, Keith Murnighan, Janice Nadler, Robin Pinkley, Vanessa Ruda, Harris Sondak, Tom Tyler, Kathleen Valley, Leaf Van Boven, Kimberly Wade-Benzoni, and Laurie Weingart. In the book, I use the pronoun we because so much of my thinking has been influenced and shaped by this set of eminent scholars.

Fourteen students who were enrolled in an advanced "managing groups" course at the Kellogg School read the book, criticized it, and improved it immensely during the fall of 1998. These people are Diego Lezica Alvear, Pablo Gonzalez Beramendi, Geoffrey Bolan, Elmer Choy, Francesco Dalla Rovere, Read T. DuPriest, Shawna Gwin, Alison Hyman, Jean Johnson, Thomas Lott, Rebecca M. Mayne, Ryan Reis, Pamela L. Skonicki, and Carrie Tower. These people improved the book tremendously and humbled me in the process of doing so.

A number of people read this book in an earlier form and provided very helpful comments: Joan F. Brett, Karen Cates, John A. Drexler, Jr., and Jeff Polzer, and our reviewers Donald Ashbaugh, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Sigal Barsade, Yale University; Theodore Forbes III, University of Virginia; Daniel Gigone, Duke University; Cristina Gibson, University of Southern California; and Judith Gordon, Boston College.

Two other people played an enormously important role in this book: Avi Steinlauf and Greg Grieff. Avi Steinlauf conducted all of the information searches on the examples covered in the book based on real companies. His work was intensive, thorough, and creative and it made the book really come alive. Greg Grieff was the first-round high-level copy editor for the book. He raised the important questions, reorganized the flow of thoughts, made the logic clear, and provided much of the focus and direction of each chapter.

This book would not have had a chance without the dedication, organization, and editorial skills of Rachel Claff, who created the layout, organized the hundreds of drafts, mastered the figures, and researched various aspects of the book.

I completed this book while I was at the Kellogg School of Management, a place whose spirit is motivating, energizing, and inspirational. I feel honored to live and work in the midst of so many great people and I am indebted to Dean Donald Jacobs and the Kellogg Teams and Groups Center (KTAG) for their generous support of this book, and to Ken Bardach for helping to provide the vision for our team executive program. Very important, grants from the National Science Foundation’s Decision Risk and Management Science Program have made it possible for me to conduct several of the research studies that I discuss in this book.