Strengths | Weaknesses | |
---|---|---|
Functional team | Handles routine work well. Line management has control of projects. Pools technical and professional expertise. | Communication and coordination across functional areas in an organisation is more difficult. Can be inflexible. Tends to push decision making upwards. |
Matrix team | Acceptable to traditional managers. Top management retains control of projects but are relieved of day-to-day decisions. Flexibility in the personnel assigned. | Project staff have dual reporting lines, which can cause conflicts of priorities. Staff appraisal and performance measurement is difficult. The team leader may not be able to influence who is assigned to the project. |
Contract team | Easy to employ technical and professional expertise. Reduces training requirements for the client. The team can use its own management structure. Can be used to bring a number of organisations together. | Difficult for the client to assess the quality of the work and progress of the project. There may be problems on acceptance as the client is the judge of project success. Difficult to identify and resolve political or organisational issues. Communication between geographically remote team members is difficult. |
The team leadership role in a: | |
---|---|
Hierarchical team | Self-managed team |
The role is vested in one individual. | The role may be shared. |
To manage the team. | To support the team by providing (or arranging others to provide) coaching and advice. |
To plan and allocate the work done by the team. | To agree, in discussion with the team, the standard of work and the aims, objectives and targets of the team. |
To monitor and appraise the performance of team members in carrying out the tasks allocated to them. | To monitor the achievement of the team as a unit. To appraise individual performance. |
To motivate the team members. | To provide the conditions for high motivation. |
To act as the main contact point for communication between the team and the rest of the organisation. | To facilitate the creation of channels of communication with the rest of the organisation. |
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Wenger (2009)
The domain: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. The domain is not necessarily something recognised as ‘expertise’ outside the community. The community: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. The claims processors in a large insurance company or students in American high schools may have much in common, yet unless they interact and learn together, they do not form a community of practice. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafés and studios to discuss the style of painting they were inventing together. These interactions were essential to making them a community of practice even though they often painted alone. The practice: A community of practice is not merely a community of interest – people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems – in short, a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The ‘windshield wipers’ engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learnt into a knowledge base. By contrast, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realise that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. Still, in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that have become a shared repertoire for their practice. Summarised from Wenger (2009)
Type | Time | Space | Culture | Example | Challenges |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Different | Same | Different | Customer service team | Interaction between organisations or cultures |
2 | Different | Different | Different | Global team | |
3 | Same | Different | Different | Regional services | |
4 | Different | Same | Same | Warehouse team | Interaction between shifts |
5 | Different | Different | Same | Multinational organisation | |
6 | Same | Different | Same | OU Regional Centres | Interaction at a distance |
7 | Same | Same | Same | Project team | Not a virtual team |
8 | Same | Same | Different | Contract team | Not a virtual team |
… a willingness to increase your vulnerability to another person whose behaviour you cannot control, in a situation in which your potential benefit is much less than your potential loss if the other person abuses your vulnerability. Gignac (2005, p. 62)