Teams are regularly assembled for the design and completion of architectural projects. These teams may be within the practice or include members from other organisations. Understanding and managing the dynamics of the team can greatly improve its performance and the quality of the outcome.
Social facilitation/impairment
Whether the presence of others will enhance or impair performance depends on many factors, but especially on the nature of the task. The performance of learnt tasks, which require more effort, is enhanced, but tasks requiring a counter-instinctual response are often impaired by the presence of others.
The type of task is critical to the likelihood that a team approach will enhance performance.
Individuals in team performance
Tasks can be categorised by their different features (Steiner). They can be divisible or unitary. They can be maximising or optimising in nature (ie success is either a function of how much is achieved, or of finding a correct or optimal solution). Tasks can also be classified by the demand they place on the way a team uses its members' abilities. A disjunctive task requires the team to select the best answer from an individual member (eg a Trivial Pursuit quiz). For a conjunctive task, the team's performance is linked to that of its least capable member (eg a documentation team, building on base information from one member). The performance of an additive task is the sum of the team members' contributions. Finally, for discretionary tasks, a team may combine individual performances in any manner it chooses.
Social factors affecting team performance
Motivation loss
In large teams with increased anonymity of individuals, there is a potential for reduced team effectiveness, particularly with additive tasks. Individuals feel that their little bit doesn't matter.
Process loss
Teams may fail to solve unitary, optimising, disjunctive tasks, even when they include members who have solved the problem. This is because it is necessary to present, argue for, and defend the solution and to have it adopted by the team. This may not occur if the team member has low status and the team structure or communication network is unsupportive.
It has been found that actual brainstorming groups produce fewer (up to 50% less) unique ideas than produced by the same number of individuals. This is thought to be because of production-blocking effects as only one member speaks at a time, others forget their idea, or feel less motivated if another is generating ideas.
Conformity
The quality of team decisions can suffer when individuals fail to express their own viewpoints after hearing others offer different opinions. A strong leader who promotes one particular view can exacerbate this.
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