Team Culture

1.The importance of team culture

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast!" This is one of the most frequently used quotes on the subject of change. It is often attributed to Peter Drucker (1909-2005), an American pioneer of modern management theory. The quote illustrates the fundamental importance of culture for organizations' prospects of success: culture plays a decisive role in determining what the people involved think about a goal and, thus, also which steps, if any, they take to achieve it. That is why every goal can be as ambitious as it is ambitious, every strategy as well thought out: if the culture does not support both, the project is doomed to failure.

Peter Drucker made his statement with a view to the entire organization. However, the actors involved are usually part of teams, which in turn can have their own (sub)cultures. We therefore focus on culture at team level. In particular, we focus on teams in companies. However, our topics are also transferable to teams in, for example, a volunteer or sports environment.

1.1Why teams often fail

The word team is on everyone's lips these days-but few people know the origin of this term. Sure, the word comes from English. But did you know that in the Middle Ages it was used to refer to a large number of draft animals? Back then, pulling together was understood to mean something completely different than it does today. In the past, team members were harnessed to the cart and driven by the farmer to maximum power. Fortunately, today's managers are no longer allowed to use a whip-and even if they were, they would hardly reach their goal with it.

Accordingly, the dictionary defines team today as "a group of people who work together on a task." The task determines who is part of the team and how long the team will last. Teams find each other; teams dissolve again; team members change. For while in the Middle Ages, ox and horse could not resist being part of a team, today's teams are based on voluntariness. As a rule, each team member can terminate his or her membership and leave the team at any time.

It is impossible to imagine today's working world without teams. They solve existing problems and develop innovations. According to Professor Rolf van Dick, social psychologist and vice president of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, the trend toward teamwork has two reasons. First, technological progress is leading to increasing specialization-in the case of organ transplantation, for example, one surgeon is no longer responsible for the entire operation, but various experts work hand in hand. Second, customers and consumers are demanding new products or solutions to their problems faster than ever before. These expectations can be satisfied only if entire teams are entrusted with the tasks, according to van Dick's thesis (see WirtschaftsWoche 48/2017, p. 21).

The dark side of teamwork

But is teamwork always the method of choice? Is teamwork in the end perhaps only a "euphemism of the mediocre for jointly produced average," as the abovementioned article from WirtschaftsWoche provocatively asks? Anyone who has ever worked in a team knows that teamwork also has its dark sides: meetings without end, an overflowing email inbox (e.g., because everyone puts everyone else in CC for everything), political games and cat fights among the team members . . . In principle, a group has more potential than an individual to solve a task, but it can also go wrong in the process.

Numerous studies show that teams are not necessarily more productive and successful:

In the nineteenth century, Max Ringelmann discovered that more people does not automatically result in more performance. He had men pull on a rope and measured the force used: if one person pulled alone, he developed a force of 63 kg. Two people together pulled with a force of only 118 kg; that is, 8 kg less than their actual potential. Three people applied a pulling force of 160 kg-29 kg less than possible! This loss of productivity with increased group size is called the Ringman effect, which can also be observed in other tasks such as brainstorming. This can be explained by a loss of coordination and motivation. The latter occurs above all when the individual contribution of a person is not recognizable as such, but the person is involved in the overall result of the group (cf. Metz-Göckel 2003, pp. 10-12).

Benjamin Walker divided 158 students into 33 teams after an individual examination of their conscientiousness. In each team one person had a low sense of duty. Each team was given a set of tasks and the information that they would all receive the same grade depending on their team score. The result was clear: the one person with the low sense of duty pulled down the performance and satisfaction of the whole team. The frustration of having a "free rider" in the team ensured that the others did not try as hard as they could have, so that one person's lack of performance was not compensated for by the rest of the group. Walker's attempt thus underlines the "one bad apple" theory-one rotten apple spoils the whole basket (see Burke 2011).

These examples illustrate that teamwork does not necessarily lead to the hoped-for results. There are many other mechanisms and reasons besides the loss of coordination and motivation that cause teams to fail colossally.

Self-reflection

Before you read on, consider the following questions:

In which teams have I worked for a longer period of time?

When and for what reasons were we successful as a team?

When and for what reasons did our team performance fall short of its actual potential?

It is impossible to imagine today's working world, which is characterized by fast pace and specialization, without teams. But working in a team does not always lead to the hoped-for results. Studies have shown that team performance can be significantly smaller in total than the potential of each individual.

1.2Success through fit

In our experience, teams are most successful when they "fit like a glove": the individual people must fit the group. The group must fit the organization. The organization must fit the market. And the market in turn must fit the individual person.

Fig. 1: Interplay of the fit of person, group, organization, and market.

Example: Imagine a sales team that has been representing its product very successfully in the German market for five years. Now the product is to be transferred to Eastern Europe. The skills of the employees and the motivation of the whole team are consistently high. But regardless of this, the team there cannot build on its old successes in Germany. It lacks the ability to connect to the Eastern European market.

The innovative work culture of Google is often cited today as a positive example of how teamwork can work. But if such a cocreative, agile team suddenly finds itself in a patriarchal, medium-sized company in a rural area, the team will most likely no longer be successful. But why exactly does this not fit together? How can we make tangible what fits and what doesn't? This requires a closer look at what exactly makes up the culture of teams.

Teams are most successful when the fit of person, organization, group, and market is right. If these four components are in harmony, there is no need for change. However, if only one of these areas changes, an imbalance arises and the other areas are required to adapt accordingly.

1.3Team culture and the 7-S model

Team culture is comparable to wind: Everyone knows it is there. Everyone feels it. It can feel very light and pleasant, but it can also unleash great destructive power. It is not visible, but only shows itself indirectly through what it does. Nobody doubts its existence-only, we cannot really grasp it.

Accordingly, there is no clear and generally valid definition of the term team culture. However, a German industry norm, DIN 69905 on "Project management, terms," dared to define project culture as "the totality of the behavior of project participants influenced by knowledge, experience and tradition and their general assessment by the project environment." According to this definition, team culture thus appears to be something that, on the one hand, is decisively codetermined by the individuals involved-but is also determined by external factors.

In our search for an approach to comprehensively describe team cultures, we came across the 7-S model...