WHAT CHARACTERIZES EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT TEAMS? A RESEARCHBASED APPROACH

摘要

Most organizations use management teams at different levels in the hierarchy to oversee and coordinate their businesses. Such teams typically make decisions, solve problems, coordinate tasks, and keep one another informed, and they can strongly influence the performance of an organization. Hence it is vital to identify factors that are associated with effective management-team performance. Based on a review of international research on management and decision-making teams from the early 1980s through today, we have identified a number of variables that seem to be important for the effectiveness of management teams. The variables are organized into 4 different categories: (a) input factors, which are relatively stable characteristics of the team and its environment (team purpose, team tasks, team size, team composition, and reward systems); (b) process factors, which refer to how the team works (meeting goals, focused communication, handling of task and relationship conflict, dialogical communication, political behavior, behavioral integration, external relationships, team learning behavior, and team leadership); (c) emergent states, which are cognitive, motivational, and affective states that emerge from the team members' interaction (team psychological safety, team cohesion, and functional team norms); and (d) output factors, which describe the different kinds of outcomes achieved by the team (task performance and individual well-being and growth). In this paper, we discuss the empirical research behind each of the variables and how the variables are associated with management-team effectiveness.