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Preface
Industrial, governmental, and educational organizations rely on teams to improve the efficiency of their business. Ineffective teams cause organizations to waste resources, fall short of performance objectives, rework designs, and extend time to market. The purpose of this article is to propose a mathematical model to predict the effectiveness of teams. A literature review points to the hypothesis that team effectiveness can be evaluated by five broad principal variables: performance, behavior, attitude, team member style, and corporate culture. The model will be assessed using a highly effective team, which is considered in this study to be a 6σ (Six Sigma) process improvement team. This model can be used to create instruments for managers to use to enhance team performance through the selection of individuals for team membership.
Introduction
Using teams is widely considered to be a simple way to enhance productivity. Most managers believe teamwork is important to the success of their department and company ([14] Dyer, 1987). Some studies place the use of teams in industry over 60 percent ([6] Campion et al. , 1993; [11] Cohen and Bailey, 1997; [40] Milosevic and Tugrul, 1997; [37] Mannix and Neale, 2005); some companies boast that their entire work force is team based ([44] Thamhain, 2004). Industry's adoption of a teamwork methodology in the pursuit of cost effectiveness and greater innovation has spawned significant research to identify variables that can be measured to characterize an effective team. A review of the literature reveals tens of thousands of papers dealing with teams. It also produced hundreds of studies identifying sets of variables used to determine the effectiveness of a team ([23] Guzzo, 1986; [25] Hackman, 1987; [5] Bettenhausen, 1991; [6] Campion et al. 1993; [24] Guzzo and Dickson, 1996; [11] Cohen and Bailey, 1997; [40] Milosevic and Tugrul, 1997; [46] Werner and Lester, 2001; [17] English et al. , 2004; [34] Kirkman et al. , 2004; [37] Mannix and Neale, 2005).
[22] Goodman (1986) identified several issues with the models generated by current theoretical work. These models present variables that are very broad in nature and are not formulated to identify relationships among the variables. [12] Devine and Phillips (2001) proposes that it will benefit practitioners to identify valid, low cost, practical predictors of team...