MANAGEMENT In their own research, Klein and Lim find a distinct


value in having some similarity between team members. The authors describe how “team mental models — defined as team members’ shared, organized understanding and mental representation of knowledge about key elements of the team’s relevant environment — may enhance coordination and effectiveness in performing tasks that are complex, unpredictable, urgent, and/or novel. Team members who share similar mental models can, theorists suggest, anticipate each other’s responses and coordinate effectively when time is of the essence and opportunities for overt communication and debate are limited. Our findings suggest that team mental models do matter. Numerous questions remain, but the current findings advance understanding of shared cognition in teams, and suggest that continuing research on team mental models is likely to yield new theoretical insights as well as practical interventions to enhance team performance,” the researchers write. Wharton management professor Nancy P. Rothbard has a similar theory on what she calls “numerical minorities” — including gender, race, age and ethnic groups. “Often


times, a numerical minority can appear to be less threatening because it’s not unexpected that someone who is different from you has different viewpoints. But if they are more similar to you and they disagree with you, some groups find that more upsetting. It can raise the level of conflict on a team. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if the conflict doesn’t get in the way of being able to think through a problem and do what needs to be done.” Klein has also looked into what factors determine who becomes important to a team. The single most powerful predictor? Emotional stability. “And the flip side is neuroticism. If someone is neurotic, easily agitated, worries a lot, has a strong temper — that is bad for the team.” Within a company, individual teams often begin to compete against each other, which Wittenberg finds can be troublesome. “One of the problems is the in-group, out-group problem,” he says. “Depending on how we identify ourselves, we can be part of a group or separate from a group. At many companies, the engineering group and the marketing group are very much at odds. But at the same time, if you talked about that company vs. another company, the teams are together, they are more alike than the people at the other company. Teams are sometimes more siloed within a company and they think they are competing with each other instead of being incentivized to work together.” When it comes to creating a successful team, “teams that


rely solely on electronic communication are less successful than those that understand why communication in person is important,” says Wittenberg. “Email is a terrible medium… . It doesn’t relate sarcasm or emotion very well, and misunderstandings can arise. There is something very important and very different about talking to someone face-to-face.” While teams are hard to create, they are also hard to fix when they don’t function properly. So how does one mend a broken team? “You go back to your basics,” says Mueller. “Does the team have a clear goal? Are the right members assigned to the right task? Is the team task focused? We had a class on the ‘no-no’s of team building, and having vague, not clearly defined goals is a very, very clear no-no. Another no-no would be a leader who has difficulty taking the reins and structuring the process. Leadership in a group is very important. And third? The team goals cannot be arbitrary. The task has to be meaningful in order for people to feel good about doing it, to commit to the task.”


Republished with permission from Knowledge@Wharton (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu), the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.


36 DOMmagazine.com | june 2020


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