Teamership: Exploring Team Effectiveness

Effective teams are what leaders, team members and organisations are craving now more than ever. How do you measure team effectiveness? Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

Team effectiveness is a complex concept to explore. It may feel as simple as measuring the team’s outputs against their targets, but that does not always capture what it means to be a highly effective team.

For our exploration, it is worth starting with a definition of team effectiveness. A key meta-analysis on a decade of team performance by John Mathiu and others released in 2019 defined team effectiveness as containing a range of factors to consider. Firstly, we need to consider who has a vested interest in any given team. Those groups are, broadly:

1. Team members

2. Other parties who have an interest in how well the team performs

It's the second group that starts to make team effective exponentially complex! "Other parties" could include senior management, shareholders, customers, suppliers, other teams within the organisation, other teams outside of the organisation and the list goes on. Even more challenging is that some of those groups (e.g. shareholders and customers) may have some conflicting goals.

As if that wasn't challenging enough to consider, the assessment of the team's work by those parties can be divided into three large areas of consideration:

1. Productivity - the team delivering measurable outputs such as sales made, units manufactured, services delivered, etc

2. Efficiency - a measure of how many resources (time, money, equipment) was used to produce the measured outputs

3. Quality - a qualitative measure of how well the outputs of the team met the required or expected standards

Even just typing these different considerations for team effectiveness gets my head spinning a little. It is easy to get lost in the detail as we try to accurately capture each aspect and combine it with other factors. An overarching challenge for teams is that all of these things are fleeting and fast-moving. That means that a thorough measure of team effectiveness (if one was able to design and explore one), would probably take a while and end up having some element of looking in the rearview mirror.

For all of these reasons, a decent proxy for team effectiveness that doesn't require the consideration of components of productivity, efficiency and quality from the perspective of all potentially interested stakeholders can be very useful - if not irrefutably correct.

Fortunately, we have access to something that fills that gap. Through a different meta-analysis to the one I mentioned earlier, Alexander Stajkovic, and others in 2009 examined the link between group potency, collective efficacy and group performance. It all gets a bit academic, but the general vibe is that their findings included that collective efficacy had a strong correlation with team effectiveness.

So, what is collective efficacy? It's basically whether a group of people believe that they are capable of doing a good job. The definition presented by Albert Bandura (the leading researcher into self and collective efficacy during his lifetime) is “a sense of collective competence shared among individuals when allocating, coordinating, and integrating their resources in a successful concerted response to specific situational demands.”

The upshot of all this? Your team's belief in its capacity to deliver good work is a technically inaccurate, but research supported shortcut to assessing an incredibly complex phenomenon around team effectiveness. That is important because effective teams are what leaders, team members and organisations are craving now more than ever.

For this week, here are a few questions for you to consider:

• How do you measure how effective your team is?

• Does your perspective on your team's effectiveness match that of others on your team?

• What aspects of team effectiveness could your team improve in - productivity, efficiency or quality?