An ounce of prevention or a pound of cure? Two experiments on in-process interventions in decision-making groups

Advancing influence tactics to the team level: the case of self-managed teams

Purpose

By combining the influence tactics and team development literatures, this paper aims to propose a new team-level approach to influence tactics in self-managed teams and a temporal account of the extent to which team-level influence tactics are associated with team performance as a dynamic process.

Design/methodology/approach

Using 75 self-managed teams, we examined the relationship between the proportion of team members who tend to use each influence tactic to a high degree and team performance at initial versus advanced stages of team development.

Findings

Results demonstrated at initial stages of team development, a high proportion of team members who tend to use assertiveness was detrimental to team performance, whereas at advanced stages of team development, a high proportion of team members tending to use ingratiation was detrimental, while rationality was positively associated with team performance. Additionally, a Fuzzy Qualitative Comparative Analysis showed that at advanced stages of team development, tactics configuration matters.

Originality/value

This study sets the stage for a team-level theory of influence tactics by examining the relationship between the proportion of team members who tend to use influence tactics to a high degree and team performance at initial versus advanced stages of team development, and the configurations of tactics associated with better team performance at these developmental stages. While the individual-level literature on influence tactics is based on notions of power and politics, in a team context and specifically with self-managed teams, there is a need to integrate theories of team processes and dynamics to understand how influence tactics are associated with performance.

The Effect of Formal Time Allocations on Learning Trajectories and Performance

How do formal time allocations in teams affect team learning trajectories and performance? We argue that allocating more time for transition phases induces steeper learning trajectories that engender a positive group atmosphere, which in turn improves team performance by improving coordination quality. We tested our hypotheses in a laboratory experiment in which teams worked on a creative design task over multiple iterations. Using a latent growth modeling approach, we found that teams with shorter action and longer transition phases during prototyping had lower initial performance but steeper learning trajectories, which indirectly led to better final team performance.

Collective Choice, Collaboration, and Communication

This article reviews recent empirical research on collective choice and collaborative problem solving. Much of the collective choice research focuses on hidden profiles. A hidden profile exists when group members individually have information favoring suboptimal choices but the group collectively has information favoring an optimal choice. Groups are notoriously bad at discovering optimal choices when information is distributed to create a hidden profile. Reviewed work identifies informational structures, individual processing biases, and social motivations that inhibit and facilitate the discovery of hidden profiles. The review of collaborative problem-solving research is framed by Larson's concept of synergy. Synergy refers to performance gains that are attributable to collaboration. Recent research has addressed factors that result in groups performing as well as their best member (weak synergy) and better than their best member (strong synergy). Communication dynamics underlying both collective choice and collaborative problem solving are discussed.

Learning to Share

Using data from 310 executive MBA students in 66 teams on a business simulation project, we explored (a) how shared leadership and team learning behaviors influence each other over time in self-managed teams, and (b) how the stability of the leadership network structure (i.e., network churn) is associated with team learning behaviors. We found that shared leadership stimulated team learning behaviors in a manner consistent with previous research at the early stages of teams’ work together, but not at the middle and later stages of the task. We also found that teams that engaged in more learning behaviors early in the task were more likely to keep their leadership network structure stable. This stability was positively associated with team learning behaviors at the midpoint and end of the task. We use these findings to elaborate theory on how leadership and learning in self-managed teams develop, change, and influence each other over time.