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This article focuses on the activities teams use to manage their organizational environment beyond their teams. We used semistructured interviews with 38 in new-product team managers in high-technology companies, log data from two of these teams, and questionnaires completed by members of a different set of 45 new-product teams to generate and test hypotheses about teams' external activities. Results indicate that teams engage in vertical communications aimed at molding the views of top management, horizontal communication aimed at coordinating work and obtaining feedback, and horizontal communication aimed at general scanning of the technical and market environment. Organizational teams appear to develop distinct strategies toward their environment: some specialize in particular external activities, some remain isolated from the external environment, and others engage in multiple external activities. The paper shows that the type of external communication teams engage in, not just the amount, determines performance. Over time, teams following a comprehensive strategy enter positive cycles of external activity, internal processes, and performance that enable long-term team success.*
This paper is about groups. Yet the research presented here differs from that usually found in the dominant social psychology paradigm. This research uses ongoing organizational teams rather than one-time laboratory groups. The tasks of these organizational teams are complex and evolving, not simple and set. The task allocators are managers, not academics. The teams' work is interdependent with other organizational units; teams cannot work in isolation. The key element that differentiates this research, however, is its focus. Rather than sitting on the group boundary and looking inward, we have focused primarily on those team behaviors that are directed outward, toward other parts of the organization, using an "external" perspective (Ancona, 1987).
Over the past half century, social psychologists have devoted substantial attention to the fine-grained analysis of behavior within groups. Many frameworks exist for that analysis, including models of group decision making (lsenberg, 1986; Nemeth, 1986; Bourgeois and Eisenhardt, 1988), task and maintenance activities (Benne and Sheats, 1948; Bales, 1983; Schein, 1988), norm development (Bettenhausen and Murnighan, 1985), and evolution (Gersick, 1988, 1989), to name a few. Yet it is only recently that the external perspective has been studied in depth.
Our research on new-product teams spans the years 1985 to 1990 and, along with other studies (e.g.,...