Caldwell, “Compose Teams to Assure Successful Boundary Activity,” in “The Blackwell Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior,” ed. Ancona, “Outward Bound: Strategies for Team Survival in an Organization,” Academy of Management Journal 33 (June 1990): 334–365 D.G. Caldwell, “Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance,” Organization Science 33 (August 1992): 321–341 D.G. Caldwell, “Bridging the Boundary: External Activity and Performance in Organizational Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 37 (December 1992): 634–665 D.G. Gladstein, “Groups in Context: A Model of Tas Group Effectiveness,” Administrative Science Quarterly 29 (December 1984): 499–517 D.G. Research shows that X-teams often outperform their traditional counterparts.ġ. X-teams manage across boundaries - lobbying for resources, connecting to new change initiatives, seeking up-to-date information and linking to other groups inside and outside the company. Instead, teams must be able to adapt to the new competitive landscape, as X-teams do. In fact, too much focus inside the team can be fatal. (See “About the Research.”) Teams that succeed today don’t merely work well around a conference table or create team spirit. Our studies all support the notion that the rules handed down by best-selling books on high-performing teams need to be revised. In other cases, forward-looking companies have established specific organizational incentives to support X-teams and their high performance levels. In some cases, they appear spontaneously. The current environment - with its flatter organizational structures, interdependence of tasks and teams, constantly revised information and increasing complexity - requires a networked approach. Product-development teams have been more innovative - and have been more often on time and on budget.
Drug-development teams have been more adept at getting external technology into their companies. Sales teams have brought in more revenue. One such team in the oil business has done an exceptional job of disseminating an innovative method of oil exploration throughout the organization.
These new, externally oriented, adaptive teams, which we call X-teams, are seeing positive results across a wide variety of functions and industries. Their entrepreneurial focus helps them respond more nimbly than traditional teams to the rapidly changing characteristics of work, technology and customer demands. Successful teams emphasize outreach to stakeholders both inside and outside their companies. Why do bad things happen to good teams? Our research suggests that they are too inwardly focused and lacking in flexibility. Another group worked well as a team but didn’t gather important competitive information its product was obsolete before launch. But because team members failed to get buy-in from division managers, they saw their project starve for lack of resources. We know one such team that had a highly promising product. Often teams that seem to be doing everything right - establishing clear roles and responsibilities, building trust among members, defining goals - nevertheless see their projects fail or get axed.
0 kommentar(er)
