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Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances J. Richard Hackman Harvard Business School Press Boston, www.hbsp.harvard.edu
Author's Credentials: Professor of social and organizational psychology at Harvard University.
Thesis: Teams perform best when allowed to manage themselves.
Scope: 1961 to mid-1990s.
File Under: No leader can make a team perform well. But all leaders can create conditions that increase the likelihood that it will.
Reason to Buy/Read: The author has targeted four groups of readers: (1) practitioners who lead/serve on a team; (2) scholars who conduct research on team behavior and performance; (3) consultants who may find it useful to inspect and analyze teams through an 11 unconventional lens"; and (4) general readers who are curious about "why it is that some teams sail into orbit while others struggle ... or crash and burn.'
In Stack's opinion, the editor should have insisted that the author focus on group one, or, at most, groups one and four. What a scholar looks for is one thing and what someone who has a meeting tomorrow at 8 am is looking for is another. This is not to say that assertions and conclusions grounded in up-to-date research and theory are unwelcome to a business audience. But when they're expressed in language that would persuade a scholar, it's too much for Stack to take.
The book is not incomprehensible, however. It's worth reading for various points the author makes, especially that few organizational tasks have clear right-or-wrong answers and they do not lend themselves to simple unidimensional...