0:08
Okay, as part of our discussion on team structure, remember we're gonna
talk about both formal team structures and informal team structures.
With respect to formal team structures, we're gonna talk about four dimensions.
The first one is what we call departmentation.
The concept is actually pretty simple.
It's how we group jobs and activities within the team.
So as the leader of your team,
you often have a choice about how you're going to group different rolls,
different formal jobs, different activities within the team.
So for example, will team members be organized by function, geography, product,
customer segment.
Really if you want to think about it.
What is the organizational chart of your team?
So the really important discussion that you have to make, for a number of years I
worked in consulting and the image that you see here was one of the most common
structures that we used in consulting teams and
some of the teams will be bigger than this, but you can get the basic idea.
We have a team leader.
We have lots of team members, but then we would group different parts of the work.
Such that, that there's a modular leader who's
leading a specific module of the broader consulting project.
There's another module leader who's handling another component
of the overall consulting project.
And each one of those module leaders might have a few team members
who are working with them in these sub groups.
But ultimately, when you start to make decisions about those module leaders and
in particular what are the modules,
you have to make some really important decisions.
Are you going to have those people be generalists or
are you going to have those groups of work be, for example, specialists?
So a generalist might be the person is going to focus on a particular region for
a company, but it's going to cut across functions or cut across lines of business.
Or you might focus on a specialist approach which is, this module leader,
or that module of work is really gonna be focused on a particular function,
marketing for example.
Or a particular product and really be a specialist in that.
These grouping decisions, of how you're gonna group different aspects of the work
are called departmentation.
And that is a formal structure that you decide, you put in place for
your team around how you're gonna group the different activities, the different
jobs in the team, which will ultimately mean what roles people have in a team.
And you need to think carefully about these decisions.
I like to think in particular about the specialist versus generalist decision.
And the reason is because, a lot of our research on team structure has
lead to insights about just how important organizing or
structuring our team by specialist functions versus generalist
work domains is important for team performance and success.
And what we're learning in you can see this here in this graph.
3:28
This is a study that was done out of the team effectiveness lab
at Michigan State University, by actually my adviser when I was in graduate school,
John Hollenbeck and some of his colleagues.
And what they discovered is this specialist versus generalist structure has
profound implications for team performance and
success depending on the task environment that your in.
For example if your in a task environment, your team task is pretty routine.
Is fairly predictable.
Is a task that this team has seen many times over and over.
What they've found in this research is that, organizing by functional specialties
4:15
leads to the best team performance, this blue bar that you see over predictable,
where we see really effective team performance relative to teams
in predictable environments that were structured as generalist.
These specialist structures enable teams to perform much more effectively
in these predictable task environments.
You might ask, why is that?
Well, in predictable routine environments,
efficiency is the secret to success, is the key
dimension upon which is going to determine whether your team is successful or not.
Given that it's predictable, it's routine, you want efficiency.
And so what we found is that the specialist
functional based structures enable that efficiency
because the people in those roles are specialists in their particular function.
So in that particular environment,
specialist structure in your team is what's gonna work best.
But it's actually the exact opposite when your team is in a task
environment that here, I call dynamic or novel.
When your team hasn't seen this complex challenge or problem to be solved.
When your task environment is dynamic.
What we find is a more generalist structure.
Tends to be the one that results in the highest team performance.
Again, you might ask why is that?
Well the generalist structure, because people are not organized by their
functional specialties, it requires a little bit more collaboration.
It requires people to draw on the expertise of others.
And what we find is teams are much more adaptive
to these novel environments when they are structured as generalists.
Because now they're not operating in these functional silos, which are very
efficient, but do not enable the cross-functional collaboration and
learning that's necessary when you have a really complex problem to be solved or
a creative challenge that often comes with that dynamic team task environment.
So again you're going to have to assess, what is your team's task environment?
Is it predictable and routine or is it more dynamic and requiring adaptability?
If it's predictable routine, a more specialist structure; if it's more
dynamic, more of a generalist structure so that you gain some of that flexibility.
That said, there' s a really important caveat to this insight and that is
It's not very easy to go back and forth depending on the direction you are going.
So it's not as simple as, well as my task environment changes
I'll just change my task or my team structure around,
from specialist to generalist, from generalist back to specialist.
What we have found, and this is one of the classic studies in team structure.
And the dynamics of team structure,
the study I'm showing you here is 63 teams in a military simulation.
7:57
Why is that?
Well, what we've found is that teams that started with a specialist structure,
they developed norms.
They developed norms for coordination and cooperation,
because they're in these functional silos.
So the only way for those teams to be successful,
given these functional silos is that they actually developed norms for
coordinating across those functional silos.
It's actually pretty counter intuitive for a lot of people.
They developed these norms and
then those norms carry over to when they become the more generalist structure.
9:02
But then when you go to a specialist structure, that
functional silos structure, it requires collaboration across those structures.
You don't have the norms for
coordination and cooperation that you need to be successful.
So, if your team today, is in a specialist structure,
chances are, you're developing norms for coordination and cooperation.
That if you were to ever take that team to a generalist structure, because maybe your
task environment became more complex, more demanding of creativity, adaptability,
flexibility, you could probably make that transition pretty easily.
9:38
However, if your team today, Is in that
generalist structure, you might not be developing the norms for
coordination and cooperation that you're gonna need if you ever choose to go
to that specialist structure, so keep that in mind
as you think about adapting your formal team structure in terms of departmentation
as you go forward as your task environment changes from either dynamic to routine and
predictable or predictable and routine to dynamic.
Keep this concept of switching is not as simple as it might seem in mind.
Scott DeRue, Ph.D.Edward J. Frey Dean at the Ross School of Business
Maxim Sytch, Ph.D.Associate Professor of Management and Organizations Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow
