4.2 Selecting People for Teamwork
University of Southern California management professor Edward Lawler says, “People are very naïve about how easy it is to create a team. Teams are the Ferraris of work design. They’re high performance and expensive.” It’s almost impossible to have an effective work team without carefully selecting people who are suited for teamwork or for working on a particular team. A focus on teamwork (individualism-collectivism), team level, and team diversity can help companies choose the right team members.
Are you more comfortable working alone or with others? If you strongly prefer to work alone, you may not be well suited for teamwork. Indeed, studies show that job satisfaction is higher in teams when team members prefer working with others. An indirect way to measure someone’s preference for teamwork is to assess the person’s degree of individualism or collectivism. Individualism-collectivism is the degree to which a person believes that people should be self sufficient and that loyalty to one’s self is more important than loyalty to one’s team or company. Individualists, who put their own welfare and interests first, generally prefer independent tasks in which they work alone. In contrasts, collectivists, who put group or team interests ahead of self – interests, generally prefer Collectivists would also rather cooperate than compete and are fearful of disappointing team members or of being ostracized from teams. Given these differences, it makes sense to select team members who are collectivists rather than individualists. Indeed, many companies use individualism-collectivism as an initial screening device for team members. While many people think of golf as the ultimate individual game, for eight decades, European and American golfers as the ultimate individual game, for eight decades, European and American golfers have squared off against each other in the Ryder Cup, a team-based competition. Instead of selecting players based on their golf records alone (i.e., individualism), U.S. coach Paul Azinger and assistasnt Olin Browne selecteddd players based on their ability to fit into the overall team of 12 players and smaller “pods” of 4 players (i.e., collectivism). If team diversity is desired, however, individualists may also be appropriate, as discussed below. To determine your preference for teamwork, take the Team Player Inventory shown in Exhibit 9.6.
Team level is the average level of ability, experience, personality, or any other factor on a team. For example, a high level of team experience means that a team has particularly experienced team members. This does not mean that every member of the team has considerable experience, but that enough team members do to significantly raise the average level of experience on the team. Team level is used to guide selection of teammates when teams need a particular set of skills or capabilities to do their jobs well.