Team skills for business planning

Foundations of Entrepreneurship

Cooperative versus competitive relations in teams

Cooperative relations in teams

1. Effective communication occurs2. Friendliness, helpfulness, and less obstructiveness are

expressed in discussions.3. Coordination of effort, divisions of labor, orientation to task

achievement, high productivity, and orderliness in discussions4. Feelings of agreement with the ideas of others and a sense of

basic similarity in beliefs and values5. Willingness to enhance the power of others in the team to

accomplish the others’ goals6. Defining conflicting interests as a mutual problem to be solved

by collaborative effort

Competitive relations in teams

1. Communication is impaired as the conflicting parties seek to gain advantage by misleading the other through use of false promises, ingratiation tactics, and disinformation.

2. Obstructiveness and lack of helpfulness lead to mutual negative attitudes and suspicion of one another’s intentions.

3. Inability to divide work and/or duplicating one another’s efforts4. The repeated experience of disagreement and critical rejection

of ideas reduces confidence in oneself and the other.5. The conflicting team members seek to enhance their own

power and to reduce the power of the others. Any increase in the power of the other is seen as a threat.

Social loafing

Social loafing is the reduction in individual effort when individuals work together on a collective task compared to when they work on an individual task.

The ballad of collective tasks• “I may have to work harder than others for the same

rewards.”• “I may have to work hard than others with the same

job.”• “I may have to work with slower others and have to pull

their weight on top of my own.”• “Maybe other team members will not work as hard as I.”• “Not everybody may do his or her fair share of the

workload.”• “I may become stuck with a bunch of losers who can’t

pull their own weight.”

What causes social loafing?

Variables that influence social loafing

• Evaluation potential• Task value• Group value• Redundancy• Group size• Expectations about others• Contingency between individual and team

performance

Evaluation potential• Individuals tend to loaf less when their contributions can be

evaluated• When individual contributions can’t be distinguished from

those of others, group members can hide in a team• When team members’ contributions are not identifiable and

assessable, the tendency to loaf increases. Why? Because this condition decreases the instrumentality of contributions

• Solution: Use peer appraisals. Being evaluated causes social loafing to decline, regardless of whether the evaluation is positive or negative.

Task value

• Group members tend to loaf less when task value increases.

• This means that a task that is pleasant, important, or significant decreases the tendency to loaf.

• High task value leads to high task outcome; executing the task is in itself a valuable outcome.

• Working on tasks becomes more unpleasant as fatigue increases. Don’t wear yourself out!

Group tasks

• Individuals tend to loaf less when group value increases.

• High group cohesion or a strong group identity can reduce social loafing.

• A team consisting of people who have known each other for a while and who have similar values will have less social loafing problems than teams consisting of strangers.

Redundancy

• The more redundant the contribution of an individual is, the more the individual will be inclined to loaf.

• Having a unique contribution to the team effort reduces the tendency to loaf. If each team member has a unique contribution to give to the team, then redundancy is minimized and the tendency to loaf is likewise minimized.

• When team members are interchangeable there is a greater likelihood of loafing.

Group size

• The tendency to loaf is smaller in small groups than in large groups

• A smaller group leads to higher perceived instrumentality; the valued outcomes have a lower chance of happening if not everyone contributes.

Expectations about others

• Individuals are less likely to loaf when they expect other team members to perform badly

• At the same time, teammates of individuals who explicitly announce that they plan to work hard will tend to loaf

• Low expectations about the performance of others lead to high perceived instrumentality because one’s own contributions become more necessary to attain the valued outcome