MMIS Blog

We recently had the opportunity to review one of Richard Hackman’s articles from the Harvard Business Review Blog Network. In the post, Hackman introduces Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork and offers his thoughts, which are backed by 40-years of group effectiveness research expertise.

In group-based environments “teamwork and collaboration are critical to mission achievement in any organization that has to respond quickly to changing circumstances”. However, collaboration is a philosophy that must be adopted by each team member. Individuals cannot be forced into working creatively with their colleagues. In fact, pressuring hesitant individuals to participate could prove to be detrimental to the entire team’s productivity. After reading Hackman’s article, we have derived that two of the misperceptions may relate more to the traditional way of working in teams, rather than the style of business collaboration.

The Life Science industry has been a proponent of the idea that bigger is better and the more people working on a task, the stronger the collaboration will be. However, Hackman has stated that if excessive people are working on a project, they will be deprived of work, which increases the likelihood of “social loafing”. However, a large group, whose tasks and to-do’s are broken into small subgroups, could achieve the same results if they all worked together on the project. By using small groups, the group leader could match up the strengths and weaknesses of team members to complement each other and strengthen the subgroup. For example: When a Life Science company researches a new market they form a large group, a portion of the research department if you will, and then divided the unit into subgroups that all report back to the manager(s) of the main group. The subgroups function as “specialists” that can focus specifically on their part of the project. The smaller subgroups maintain consistent level of accountability and provide an even workload. This combines the flexibility of smaller groups with the productivity of larger groups.

“Face-to-face interaction is passé. Now that we have powerful electronic technologies for communication and coordination, teams can do their work much more efficiently at a distance.” This is a difficult misperception to combat. While face-to-face interaction is absolutely needed to be optimally productive and innovative, technology has developed at such a rapid pace that individuals can now videoconference over an IP connection that virtually brings them into and office location. Innovative technologies today, such as enterprise collaboration platforms, provide the tools that balance the production realized from being in the same location with the cost-saving benefits of working remotely.

As the provider of a sophisticated cloud-based collaboration platform, we are intrigued by this article and support the findings within. If you would like to read the article please visit the HBR website.