02.02 - Departmentation: How to Group and Organize Jobs in the Team

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From the course by University of Michigan

Leading Teams

853 ratings

University of Michigan

Leading Teams

853 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Leading People and Teams

In this course, you will learn how to build your team, improve teamwork and collaboration, and sustain team performance through continuous learning and improvement. Specifically, you will learn best practices for composing a team and aligning individual and team goals. You will also learn how to establish roles, build structures, and manage decision making so that your team excels. This course will also help you manage critical team processes such as conflict resolution and building trust that have a profound impact on your team’s performance. You will discuss some of the best ways to harness the productive potential of teams while mitigating the risks and traps of teamwork. In modern organization, most of work is done in teams, yet the results of teamwork are exceptionally mixed. Many teams are poorly designed and structured, fraught with dysfunctional conflict, experience coordination breakdowns and serious motivation challenges. As a result, many teams fail to realize their potential and frequently underperform even individuals working on similar tasks. After completing this course, you will acquire a set of tools and practices that enable you to effectively set up, run, evaluate, and continuously improve your team. Such insights will both make you a more effective team leader but also a standout contributor in team settings.

From the lesson

Structuring Your Team for Excellence

In the first module of the course, we discussed your role as a team leader in designing your team's size, composition, diversity of personalities and values, and goals. In addition, you must determine how best to structure your team, specifically how you will structure decision making, rewards, and roles. You must also ensure the team has a clear set of norms that guide its behavior. In this module, you will learn strategies and tactics to structure your team effectively.

02.02 - Departmentation: How to Group and Organize Jobs in the Team10:22

02.03 - Centralization: How to Structure Decision Making in the Team13:05

02.04 - Rewards: How to Structure Rewards in the Team14:19

02.05 - Team Rewards and Punishments1:30

02.06 - Virtuality: How to Manage Virtual Team Structures14:31

Meet the Instructors

Scott DeRue, Ph.D.
Edward J. Frey Dean at the Ross School of Business
Management and Organizations, Ross School of Business
Maxim Sytch, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Management and Organizations Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow
Management and Organizations, Ross School of Business

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.

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

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.

Where we actually switch teams from different structures.

Some teams went from a specialist to a generalist structure,

other teams went from a generalist to a specialist structure over time.

What we've found is it's much easier

to go from a specialist structure to a generalist structure

than it is to go from a generalist structure to a specialist structure.

In fact, those teams that went from specialist to generalist performed,

on average, about 6% better than those other teams.

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.

The opposite is true when we put teams first in a generalist structure.

Because there's a generalist, I can operate in my own world.

Because I have all the functions in that world

I don't have to collaborate as much with the other generalist.

If I'm in the North American region, I have finance, I have marketing,

I have operation, so

I can manage North America without having to collaborate with Asia or Europe.

Same's true for Asia and Europe.

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.

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.

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