Instability Can Benefit Teams with Different Expertise
hubie writes:
Knowledge-Diverse Work Teams Benefit from Fluid Hierarchies:
Co-workers who team up to solve problems or work on projects can benefit when they have less in common and take turns spotlighting their different expertise, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin. The findings have implications for how managers can better form and manage teams so all voices are heard.
Groups of workers with varied knowledge - or "knowledge-diverse teams" - share more information among group members, a key trait of effective teamwork. [...]
"For teams, instability is often seen as a negative," Gray said. "But we found a scenario in which instability is helpful. Within a diverse team, this type of fluidity helps members bolster their position and standing by demonstrating their expertise and unique value."
Even so, homogenous teams - ones made up of members with similar knowledge and skills - share more when members' influence over time is stable.
A knowledge-diverse new product development team could include a scientist, engineer, operations expert and a marketer, while a startup team may have a chief technology officer, chief marketing officer and chief financial officer. In contrast, a homogenous team might be made of sales members who do the same task but may have different kinds of customers.
[...] Workers who are a part of a knowledge-diverse team where influence diverges should know that by sharing information, they can demonstrate their worth to co-workers and gain greater influence and trust within the team. Gray said managers need to understand that it's insufficient to bring together people with diverse knowledge and simply set them on a task. Instead, managers of knowledge-diverse teams need to think about how they can help to elevate different viewpoints as tasks evolve. Managers of homogenous teams should mull how they might promote stability so members don't compete for status.
What were the makeups of the best and worst collaborative teams you've worked on? Is any of this important, or do the variabilities in skills and experience between people wash all this out and team effectiveness is just one big stochastic crapshoot?
Journal Reference:
Steven M. Gray et al., Leveraging Knowledge Diversity in Hierarchically Differentiated Teams: The Critical Role of Hierarchy Stability, Acad Manage J, 2022
DOI: 10.5465/amj.2020.1136
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