A team effectiveness model provides a roadmap to enhance team operations and support their development. Explore various models to determine which best improves team understanding and performance.
By Brad Nakase, Attorney
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Building a high-performance team is a process rather than a single moment. Teams take time to form and involve dedication, commitment, and persistence. A team effectiveness model can help you along the way by providing you with a clear road map that will help you better understand your team’s operations and determine how to best support their further development.
To determine which team effectiveness model would be best for improving team understanding and performance, let’s examine the various models.
A team effectiveness model serves as a framework or tool to assist organizations and leaders in assessing the performance of their teams and enhancing team formation, management, and training in order to increase output and achieve common goals.
What could stand in the way of a team reaching ideal performance? What leads to team dysfunction? What is necessary for team members to perform at their highest level? How must colleagues cooperate in order to unlock each person’s greatest potential? These are some of the questions a team effectiveness model might help answer.
HR managers and team managers can assess their teams’ effectiveness and efficiency objectively and create better solutions by using team effectiveness models.
Let’s examine some of the most widely used models of team effectiveness, their benefits and drawbacks, and the kinds of teams they work best for.
Irwin Rubin, Mark Plovnick, Ronald Fry, and Richard Beckhard popularized the GRPI (goals, roles, processes, and interpersonal connections) model when it was first presented in 1972. It is one of the most well-known models of team efficiency and consists of the following four elements:
The GRPI model may help pinpoint the issue and find a solution for dysfunctional teams that aren’t meeting objectives or have lost their way. Here, knowing how the elements relate to one another is helpful.
If your team isn’t meeting its objectives, for instance, you might check to determine if each person is held accountable and has a defined function. Its basic tenet is that you can have a successful team if every member is kind, has a function to play, and a mechanism in place to help them. It’s also a fantastic model to apply when assembling a brand-new team.
The drawback is that this model is static; it only reveals a team’s performance at a certain point in time, not during the team’s whole lifecycle. It also depends on teams being somewhat structured right away rather than growing naturally over time.
The Hackman team effectiveness model was first presented by J. Richard Hackman, who began researching teams in the 1970s. After forty years of study, he found that the conditions that allow a group of individuals to flourish are more important for collaboration than the individual traits or behaviors of team members.
His model consists of the following five factors:
Managers that want to know how to effectively organize their team and provide them with the resources they need to become self-sufficient in the long run will find the Hackman model most useful.
Four dimensions form the foundation of the Robbins and Judge team effectiveness model, and each is necessary for a successful team:
The Katzenbach and Smith model was created in 1993 as a result of the researchers’ study of teams facing difficulties at work. They proposed that there are five different levels of teamwork: working group, pseudo-team, potential team, actual team, and high-performing team, which is the goal for any organization.
Members of a high-performing team do more than merely cooperate with one another. Three possible results are possible:
These are the triangle model’s points.
A team must focus on the three effectiveness factors—skills, accountability, and commitment—which comprise the triangle’s sides in order to accomplish all three outcomes.
This approach may help boost ownership and engagement and is best suited for team members who are having difficulty changing from an individual to a team perspective. Furthermore, it enables teams to identify and share a mission with the rest of the company.
The model’s limitation is that it is only applicable to small teams with frequent meeting times. Furthermore, the team will never develop into a cohesive unit and will remain in the pseudo-team stage if they get caught up in early conflict.
The T7 team model of effectiveness was created in 1995 by Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo. They identified two external and five internal elements, all of which start with the letter “T”:
Internal elements:
External elements:
For a team to perform at its best, every element is essential.
Managers that want to understand the various factors that affect team effectiveness and how they function together are most suited for the T7 model. This can help you determine where to direct your efforts and resources in order to forge a more cohesive team.
In the event that talent is lacking, for instance, you know that you should either add more training or replace the member with more relevant experience. If there isn’t enough support from management, you know that you have to work harder to get your team the tools and backing they require to be successful. This is another of the model’s drawbacks because the team can’t function as well without outside assistance.
A version of Hackman’s earlier model, this 1992 model emphasizes the significance of group design and organizational environment, as well as the impact they have on team performance.
There are six components to the model:
This approach works best with pre-existing teams and enables you to examine the context of a team.
Bruce Tuckman proposes that there are four sequential stages in the development of any team, and these stages are represented in Tuckman’s FSNP model. But ten years after he first put out his model, he included a fifth stage, which made it the FSNPA model:
This model is very helpful for managers who wish to learn about the various phases of team growth. In addition, it facilitates teams’ ability to collaborate more successfully by enabling them to accept conflict and natural differences. However, some team members can find it too uncomfortable because conflict exists at every level of this approach.
It is essential to remember that teams might transition between phases at any point. For instance, they could be performing when new members join, which would return them to the storming phase.
Patrick Lencioni created a unique team effectiveness model. It focuses on what your team shouldn’t have, rather than what they ought to have. The theory goes that you can build and lead a more productive group by being aware of the dysfunctions within your team.
A team can experience the following five dysfunctions:
This model is most appropriate for managers who want to know what might be damaging to a team’s performance, how to prevent it, and how to handle it in the event that it does occur. It assists you in figuring out the reasons behind a team’s inefficiencies and devising solutions to increase productivity.
Five components make up an effective team, according to Dr. Frank LaFasto and Carl Larson’s model. These are the following:
This model of team effectiveness emphasizes group thinking and is a good fit for managers who wish to learn more about the dynamics of cooperation and teamwork.
But this model falls short of providing managers with guidance on how to accomplish the characteristics that have been identified as essential to team effectiveness.
More than 200 individuals were interviewed by Google, and more than 180 Google teams’ more than 250 qualities were examined.
Their conclusions?
The composition of a team has less bearing on its performance than how its members interact, organize their work, and value each other’s contributions.
They determined that a successful team needs five essential dynamics:
Psychological safety is the most significant element (the foundation of the other four), according to Google, but all five are necessary to build a high-performing team.
The Google model encourages serious discussions among teammates about ways to improve and is well-suited for managers looking to identify areas where their team needs to grow.
David Sibbet and Allan Drexler, researchers, created the Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model. It describes seven steps in all, four for team formation and three for improving long-term performance.
Managers who wish to boost their team’s productivity or identify what’s preventing them from reaching their goals may find this approach useful. This model’s disadvantage is that it requires time to create and deploy.
The not-so-secret key to a company’s success is frequently teamwork. Understanding team effectiveness models, at least in part, aids managers and HR specialists in creating high-performing teams.
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