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J.R. Hackman. Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002, 312 pages, $29.95.
Reviewed by Valerie I. Sessa, Hoboken, NJ.
There are many books available on teams, but few are written by such an accomplished and widely recognizable teams expert. And few are based on a decades-long program of research on organizations and teams. Hackman, a leading thinker and scientist on group and organization behavior, brings together his knowledge, theory, and research on groups into a nicely packaged, jargon free, and easy-to-read book that identifies five conditions that leaders can use in designing and supporting a team so that the team can manage itself.
Hackman writes the book to appeal to a broad audience, but it is primarily written for practitioners and consultants who have not come across his findings since college or graduate school. He includes a wonderful and in-depth notes section at the end of the book for those who want to delve deeper into his primary sources. But I would guess that most organization and groups experts are already familiar with Hackman's work and will find little new-mainly because we gobble up his articles as soon as they are published. What this book does definitely for the practitioners and helpfully for the experts is to bring his expertise, theory, and research together into a practical and readable one-stop package (his 2-decade "story"), making his contributions easily accessible to practitioners, the general public, and, yes, even the experts.
Hackman dispels the myth that there is a cookie-cutter formula or leadership style that will ultimately lead to team effectiveness. Instead, he outlines five conditions, as well as when to implement the conditions, to foster (but not guarantee) team effectiveness. The leader's job is to enable these conditions, then get out of the way and let the team manage itself and do its work. The book covers exactly what team effectiveness is, an in-depth discussion of each enabling condition, some imperatives for leaders, and...