MGT 464 Module 3 Teams and Team Effectiveness Example

Six Experts and No Team: Development, Conditions and Collective Intelligence in a Board Game Launch Group

Student Name

Business Administration Program, Aspen University

MGT 464: Organizational Behavior

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Six Experts and No Team: Development, Conditions and Collective Intelligence in a Board Game Launch Group

Driftless Games, a composite publisher in Madison, Wisconsin, designs and sells tabletop board games through hobby stores and online. Its next game, a cooperative adventure for families, must be manufactured by August to reach stores for the holiday season. Four months ago, the company formed a launch team: the game's designer, an illustrator, a developer who runs playtests and balances rules, a production manager who works with the overseas manufacturer, a marketer and a sales lead who manages store accounts. Each is highly skilled. Yet the team has missed two milestones, the final rules and the component list, and meetings regularly end in arguments without decisions. The owner asked for an analysis before the schedule slips further.

Where the Team Is

Tuckman (1965) read across dozens of small-group studies and saw a common progression. In forming, members orient themselves to the task and to each other. In storming, conflict emerges over roles, priorities and influence. Norming is the point where expectations settle and members begin to pull together. Performing arrives when that settled group can spend its energy on the work itself. The launch team moved quickly through forming, then entered storming and has stayed there. The designer wants more components to make the game richer; the production manager wants fewer to keep cost under $14 per unit; marketing wants a larger box for shelf presence; and sales wants a price under $40. Each member is defending a legitimate function, but no one has a way to settle the disagreements.

Conditions for Effectiveness

Hackman (2002) argued that team effectiveness depends less on leaders' styles or members' talents than on whether certain conditions are in place. A team must be a real team, with clear membership and interdependent work. It needs a compelling direction, a purpose that is clear, challenging and consequential. It needs an enabling structure, including well-designed tasks, the right size and mix of members and norms for conduct. It needs a supportive organizational context, providing information, rewards and resources. And it benefits from expert coaching at the right moments.

What Makes Groups Smart Together

Woolley et al. (2010) gave groups a wide range of tasks and found that a general factor, which they called collective intelligence, predicted how well a group performed on new tasks. This factor was not strongly related to the average or highest individual intelligence in the group. Instead it was related to the average social sensitivity of members, their skill at reading others' emotions; to how evenly members took turns speaking; and to the proportion of women in the group, which was partly explained by social sensitivity. In the launch team's meetings, observation showed that the designer and the sales lead spoke more than half the time, and the illustrator and production manager rarely spoke unless asked. Talent is plentiful; equal participation is not.

The Owner's Part

Hackman stressed that the conditions for team effectiveness are largely set by the people who create and sponsor the team. The owner formed the launch team with a brief kickoff and then stepped back, assuming experts would sort out their differences. She also kept functional bonuses in place, so the production manager was rewarded for low cost and the marketer for shelf impact, pulling members in opposite directions. Much of the team's difficulty traces to these choices, which is why most of the fixes in the plan belong to her.

What Members Said

Short interviews with each member revealed that everyone wanted the game to succeed and that most thought the others did not understand their constraints. The illustrator said she learned about component changes only after drawing art for components that were later cut. The production manager said the manufacturer's deadline for final files was never shared with the full team. Information was not flowing, and the quietest members had the most to tell.

Recommendations

The owner will meet the team to agree on one written goal: a family game that retails for $39.99, costs no more than $13.50 per unit to produce and ships to stores by September 15. Decision rights will be set by area: the designer decides gameplay and rules, the production manager decides components and cost within the goal, marketing decides box art and messaging and the owner breaks ties that cross areas within 48 hours. Meetings will follow a simple norm: each member speaks to each agenda item before decisions, with a rotating facilitator who tracks speaking time. A shared launch bonus will replace separate functional targets. The owner will arrange for an experienced producer from a partner studio to coach the team for three months, meeting every two weeks.

Risks

Clear decision rights could make some members feel overruled, especially the marketer, whose box size preference conflicts with the cost goal. The owner will explain the reasons for each decision area and invite members to raise concerns with her directly. The coach's role is to help the team work, not to make decisions, a line the owner will make clear at the start.

Moving Toward Norming

Tuckman's sequence suggests that storming ends when the group establishes norms and roles. The decision rights and meeting norms are designed to do exactly that, turning disputes into decisions owned by the right person.

Measures

The team will be judged on meeting the next milestones, final rules by June 1 and components by June 15, and on process: speaking time balance in recorded meetings and a short monthly survey on whether members feel heard.

Conclusion

Driftless Games' launch team has talent but lacks direction, structure and coaching. Tuckman's model explains its stalled development, Hackman's conditions locate the causes and Woolley and colleagues' evidence points to the quality of interaction, more than the talent on the roster. A clear goal, decision rights and fair participation should move the team from storming to performing in time for the holidays.

References

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686-688. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1193147