Unit 8 Assignment 1: Leadership and Teamwork

Unit 8: Assignment 1: Leadership and Teamwork

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In this assignment, I will describe the features of an effective team, explain how teams develop, the skills and attributes needed by a team leader and team members and analyse the effectiveness of each type of team using models of team development, I shall do this in the format of a three-chapter manual, the first chapter exploring the types of teams, the second, team development and the third, team leadership. I shall then go on to write a report, using examples of teams to analyse the type of team, team development and leadership styles presented within each team where possible.

Manual:

    This manual has been compiled to explore the types of teams, team development and leadership. The purpose of this manual is to identify and simplify key concepts for being a good team leader/member and to enable individuals and managers to assess their own leadership/team member styles.

Chapter 1: Types of Teams

    Organisations and businesses require teamwork to ensure smooth operational functionality within their organisation. Teams are typically thought of as groups of people, often under the same employment, striving towards a common goal however, you can have a one-man team who ultimately takes responsibility of team leader and team member. For the purposes of this manual, we will focus on group-teams. Furthermore, it is important to note that though it is often the case that team leaders will report to their own manager and the team members will report to their team leader, it is not uncommon for teams to be entirely self-managed where more senior management will only get involved if targets are not being met or the team is otherwise at risk of being off-target.

    So, the first type of team we will explore are called Project Teams, Project Teams can be characterised into three sub-groups, for lack of a better term, these are the functional team, the matrix team and the contract team. We will explain these in more detail shortly but first, what is the point of project teams?

Project Teams:

    Project teams come together to form a single unit within the organisation, the team members (and leader) work on a single project or multiple projects which equates to achieving a single, common objective. Apple would use Project Teams in their design, manufacture and production of their latest products; you will have product designers working on the design of the body of their latest smartphone, this same team may also design the shape, style and location of buttons and input components (or lack thereof, as would be the case with the iPhone 7’s lack of audio jack). Similarly, Apple will also have a programming team, they will be responsible for ensuring the code and software is installed correctly onto the devices and a quality assurance team who will ensure high quality products are coming off the production line before being dispatched to retailers for sale; all the teams mentioned in the Apple example would work towards a single common goal of developing, manufacturing and retailing an Apple smartphone. So, what are the sub-teams?

Functional Team:

A functional team is a team made up of members who are responsible for completing the same or similar task as one another to achieve a certain goal and is often lead by one single person as a team leader. A good example of this type of team would be a production line at a Samworth Brother’s factory, such as Bradgate Bakery in Leicester who make sandwiches for Tesco, you would have a team of 12 who are completing the same task repetitively. Person A would be responsible for placing the bread on the conveyor belt which would pass under a spreading machine (to spread butter onto the bread) before progressing onto Person B who will place the first lot of ingredients onto the bread, Person C would be responsible for ensuring the ingredient is laid out correctly, Person D will add the next ingredient and Person E would add the final slice of bread before the unsliced sandwich went through a slicer and then progresses onto Person F who would place the sandwiches into cartons which are passed through a heat sealing machine and then onto dispatch, the team responsible for packaging the sandwiches for distribution to individual stores. The team leader will be delegating to the team members what they must do and how many sandwiches are to be made to make up the order. It is the team leader’s duty to ensure orders are fulfilled before deadlines. The act of passing a task from one department to another, for example, in Bradgate Bakery, sending the sandwich from production to dispatch, is often referred to “Baton Passing”, according to the Open University (see reference/Source). The benefit of Baton Passing is that it allows teams to ensure their work is carried out correctly without having too many tasks that may confuse them or otherwise effect their own operational ability; it has been proven that a longer, detailed, step-by-step style to-do list is more effective than a shorter, vague task-list and this is because you can focus on individual tasks. Likewise, if you’re a production line operative with only one task that you know inside out, you will perform your task far better than having to complete several tasks to the same, high standard.

Matrix Team:

    A matrix team is a team of individuals who answer to different managers yet still strive towards a common goal. Matrix teams will answer to a project manager, responsible for overseeing the project they are working on but will also report to their own functional line manager. Over the course of several weeks, in college, students were separated into teams and one member of the team took responsibility of project manager/team leader; our team would answer to our project manager/team leader but would ultimately report to our tutor, as they are responsible for our learning. Another example would be Alphabet who own Google, using their product, the Pixel Smartphone, there was a matrix team in place on a rather large scale. Their team structure was laid out as follows:

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Department

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R&D

Design

Manufacturing

Marketing

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Project Manager

Team Leaders

Person A

Person E

Person I

Person M

Team Members

Person B, Person C, Person D

Person F, Person G, Person H

Person J, Person K, Person L

Person N, Person O, Person P

The issue with Matrix teams are the fact that there can be a problem that is often referred to as the “Two-Boss problem”, whereby reporting to two different individuals who can quite likely be from different departments and not have a strong, collaborative relationship can cause conflicting information to be given to the team members. This can arise from a conflict between department managers and team the project manager or it can arise from a conflict between team members and different team leaders working underneath the project manager. Similarly, if a team member answers to a different manager outside of the relative department and beside their team leader and project manager, well, in cases like this, full operational functionality is very difficult to achieve, depending on the strength of communication and collaboration between individuals within an organisation.

Contract Team:

    A contract team is a team comprising of individuals outside of the organisation. A small business may contract a team of researchers from IpsosMori and SurveyMonkey to complete Research and Development (R&D) on their behalf due to not having their own in house research teams. This can be very effective as it brings in a different perspective who aren’t indoctrinated with company policies. However, this also presents a downfall in the sense where these external teams may not appreciate or understand the ethos of the organisation they have been contracted by and this can have an adverse effect on the research they carry out unless the team is operating under strict instruction of a person well established within the organisation who can help the contracted team to better understand the market they are trying to research (based on demographics such as geographic and psychographic factors). With that being said, contract teams can be very effective. My landlord, Asra Housing Association, contract J. Tomlinson (a property maintenance company) to carry out works and repairs on tenant’s properties. J. Tomlinson in turn will contract a team from Neil North Associates, who are Gas Safe registered, to carry out works on the gas mains or boiler repairs for the respective tenants as J. Tomlinson themselves are not Gas Safe Registered.

Self-Managed Teams:

As you can imagine, communication and collaboration are of the utmost importance in every type of team, particularly in the Matrix team and Contract team types. Communication is equally important in our next team type, Self-Managed Teams, whereby team members take a collective responsibility of team leader and ensuring the team operates effectively whilst also meeting targets and achieving goals. Self-managed teams have full control over how work is achieved, internal performance issues such as the delegation of work and also the decision making and problem solving aspects that they may face as a team. Self-Managed teams really put emphasis on the saying “All for one and one for all” because if one team member fails to complete their task, it then falls on the other team members to pick up the workload as they are all equally responsible. An example of this can be seen in my own team where I was team leader; I took a relaxed approach to leading the team, we had to produce posters for the Tuckman theory of Team Development and the XY Theory of management styles, my team members were Sam, Khalid and Chantelle. I asked Sam to complete a version of the Tuckman theory, likewise, I would do the same as I expected this one to be the larger workload, we could then compare. Khalid was responsible for researching and producing a poster on Theory X and Chantelle the same for Theory Y. Unfortunately, myself and Khalid were the only members of our team to do our work with Chantelle telling me only the night before that she failed to complete it. Chantelle had the cheek to criticise my leadership abilities the day the task was assigned though I feel this criticism was unwarranted, given the fact I was the only person in our team actively communicating with other team members. Sam also failed to complete the work but I did not have to cover his workload as I had already completed my version of the poster, I did however have to also do Chantelle’s work which I didn’t have to do but if I hadn’t, it would have let our entire group down which, as team leader, was not something I wanted to do. Talking about myself as team-leader would imply our group was not Self-Managed but outside of the title of team leader, I gave my team members one instruction each and gave them full responsibility over their work. Between those of us who were active team members, we managed to achieve a common goal and took equal responsibility. Once the work was completed, I checked the work, made appropriate edits and submitted the work giving full credit where it is due. It is common in self-managed teams for one team member to take an ‘alpha’ stance within the group.

What is the difference between a Project Team and a Self-Managed team?

To summarise this chapter, I will explain the difference between a project team and self-managed team in a simple, concise fashion.

The difference between the two teams is simply that one (the project team) is structured in a hierarchical format whereas the other (Self-Managed Teams) are structured in a linear format, whereby every member of the self-managed team is equally responsible for the overall success of their team whereas in a project team, only the team leader/project manager is responsible for the overall success of their team.

There is another, lesser known team time that is becoming increasingly popular in the new “gig” economy that the world is currently experiencing, it’s not new, mind you. This type of team is a Virtual Team, commonly utilised in the tech industry and for small business owners who cannot afford to hire local talent. This is where the team members aren’t in the same physical location and instead collaborate using applications like Microsoft Sky Drive and Google Drive. My friend Jason leads a virtual team for Electrocomponents PLC in Corby, Leicestershire; every Friday, he will visit me and my partner, with a Costa coffee in each hand for us and then he will proceed to sit in the kitchen on his skype call, working collaboratively with his three staff members, due to confidentiality, unfortunately, he isn’t allowed to tell me what he is working on. A more relevant example is Dell who, in their corporate social responsibility report, state that they aim to enrol at least half of their workforce into flexible work programs, this could mean utilising virtual teams far more than we can infer they already do from their talks given at the TRaD Works Forum in 2016 which is all about remote work, according to Quora. Also, TopTal, amongst other companies, match organisations with developers and designers all over the world on a virtual basis. When I was in the multi-level marketing industry, I would often attend training calls on Skype and GoMeeting where we would interact with other “team members”, I wouldn’t personally call it an actual team myself as we were all independent business owners simply reselling the same product ranges as one another, it’s like calling different MacDonald’s franchise owners a team, nonetheless, we did interact with one another and share our own experiences and advice on topics such as finance, customer relationships and retention, complaints handling and of course, new product and promotion training so one could argue there was a team-based environment but we were all working towards our own individual goals, very few of us had a vested interest in whether or not their competitor (which is, in effect, what we all were) ceased trading, in fact, that would be rather advantageous in the fact most established multi-level marketing businesses operate in the same, diluted industries, some MLMs include; Forever Living, Herbalife, Utility Warehouse (though this is not in a diluted industry as there are very few MLMs operating in the utility industry as opposed to health and fitness or cosmetics industries which most MLMs operate within), Vemma (who sell ‘healthy’ energy drinks, not very well established but an interesting example all the same), Avon, Kleeneze and Betterware (both of whom mostly retail homeware and cleaning products).

Also, it is important to mention that teams may be temporary, where they come together to work on one specific task, an example of a temporary team could be when a landlord decides to renovate a property, a team may be formed of painters and decorators, electricians, plumbers and builders who would collectively work together to ensure work is completed on time, one the house has been renovated, the contractors may go their separate ways; often, companies who provide building solutions, like J Tomlinson, will contact several companies and organise the team, give them all a J Tomlinson branded van and send them off to do whatever work is required by J Tomlinson’s client; Asra, my landlord, contracted the services of J Tomlinson to install a new boiler in my neighbour’s maisonette and replace the insulation in the loft, J Tomlinson then contracted the services of Neil North Associates for the boiler replacement and another company who were tasked with replacing the insulation in my neighbour’s loft; the two companies had to come together as a matrix style team as they were working in the same property but, being operatives from two separate companies, nobody had authority over the other. When the work was completed, both operatives when back to their respective companies, unlikely to work together again.

Teams can also be permanent, such as Studio-40 in Loughborough who manage businesses’ social media presence and provide Search Engine Optimisation services to improve online visibility in the competitive world of internet based advertising where a few of employees work together as a team on SEO improvement for companies like Shoe Zone and StudentCrowd and new clients going forward; there are no plans as yet to disband the team, whilst they fulfil the objectives of improving the visibility of their client’s on search engines, they may work independently or in other teams on other projects depending on their client’s requirements.

Chapter 2: Team Development

    It is common for teams to not function at their full optimisation right from the offset, like any relationship, they have to be nurtured and people within the team should learn to compromise with one another. You may have a team which consists of multiple departments, including manufacturing and sales. It is well known that many salespeople have an air of confidence that can often be misconstrued as arrogance, this arrogance can brush up the other team members the wrong way and cause friction between the operational abilities of each individual team member, with that being said, sales are very important and without their involvement, it will be harder to sell the product so for this team to succeed, the sales department have to tone down their behaviour and mannerisms whilst the manufacturing department may have to compromise by using “layman terms” instead of sophisticated industry jargon that, for the sales person, simply goes over their head.

    Going back to the point of team development, there are several theoretical models that define the stages of group development. The most commonly used model in business is Bruce Tuckman’s theory on the four (or five) stages of team development; Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing (and adjourning):

    Stage One: Forming:

        This is the first stage, typically, an employer or manager would delegate team member roles to each individual member of the team, however, sometimes the team member role is obvious in the sense where you wouldn’t put the responsibility of ensuring the work stations are kept tidy on an IT technician in a software development firm, that manager would deserve the sack. Nonetheless, at this stage, each individual team member will rely heavily on their team leader, even in a matrix team, the team members need some form of guidance and as previously mentioned, in all team types, there will be someone who develops an “alpha” role within the team and it may not necessarily be the team leader. At this stage, a team leader has to be ready and prepared to answer a lot of questions regarding the team in general, their objectives and individual team members and their personal objectives within the team alike. Team roles will be unclear as team members also begin to shape their own opinions on how much effort they need to put into the work at hand to ensure their team reach their objectives.

    Stage Two: Storming:

        The second stage is storming, it describes perfectly the emotions and feelings amongst team members as they, for lack of a better term, fight to establish their place and role within the team. Sometimes, you will have two people who want to establish themselves as the team leader or second in command, this will cause friction. In our own team-building activities in class, we would find myself and Sam having very opposing viewpoints and opinions on how best to achieve our objectives, this was seen especially in the task of building a tower using spaghetti and marshmallows, one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever had to do but fun, nonetheless. However, through compromise, we developed a plan between our team members to get to where we needed to be but unfortunately, even with our late co-operation, we did not come first in the challenge though we may have done if the individual judging our tower (our tutor) had moved just a tiny bit faster, but who am I to complain about the potential sabotage… Because of the conflict at this early stage of group formation, it is of my opinion and the opinion of many others though not shared by all, that this stage actually brings team members together stronger in the sense where the air is cleared, so to speak, before too late in the team development. If a new employee joins a company and is placed in a team of people who are veterans of the company this new person is working for and they have a fantastic idea to optimise the rate in which the team meet their objectives, it can be hard for old habits to die hard for the other team members so it is important for that new employee to speak up during this stage as later, it will be harder to find your authority within the group. It’s like having a child, if you give in to a young child when they throw a tantrum at a young age, they’ll quickly learn that having a tantrum gets them what they want; later, you decide enough is enough and you’re no longer going to give in, well the tantrums will get worse because the child will have become set in their ways; Tantrum = Reward. Whereas, if you taught your child from a young age that tantrums simply reinforce your refusal, they would learn to abstain from such behaviour because the parent had asserted their authority early in the relationship development process, as you can see from this example, such models we use in business can be referenceable in other aspects of day to day life, also. In this stage, conflict is rife and is best avoided by focussing on the objectives at hand, asserting your roles and responsibilities and overcoming objections within the team.

    Stage Three: Norming:

        In this stage, we are aware of our individual roles and responsibilities and things begin to work a bit like clockwork. We know who is responsible for what, we know who is outspoken and who is timid and where we stand with one another. All of the conflict during the previous stage has been rectified and now, it is time to discover each other’s strengths and weaknesses, it is likely that, in previous stages, one member would suggest something and agreement would be inferred as they all come together to carry out the suggestion, this is because of the lack of relationship between members. Now, however, when one suggestion seems daft or even, not quite complete, what we will find in this stage is individuals speaking up on their concerns in regards to the suggestion or offering their own advice on how to improve the suggestion, we will also find group agreement comes into play rather than inferred agreement due to silence. It is also in this stage that sub-teams may form and authority is shared amongst certain group leaders. In my own team, myself and Sam were very vocal in our goals whereas Khalid was extremely slow and seemingly uninterested in the activities and Chantelle needed a large amount of motivation before she would get stuck in, so what we found was myself and Sam largely working together whilst the other two team members maintained a low amount of responsibility, I personally took the decision to task Chantelle and Khalid with a lesser amount of work than myself and Sam when we came to develop posters on different theories because by now I had learned who was reliable and who was not. I was shocked to find Khalid and myself finished our delegated work first, with me being the team leader, I was unsurprised when Chantelle told me the day before the posters were due in that she was unable to complete the work but I was also shocked that Sam had also failed to complete his work though this wasn’t too much of an issue as he was responsible for reproducing the same poster as myself on the Tuckman theory where we would then compare and contrast our own works, Khalid and Chantelle were tasked with the XY Theory, in hindsight, I should have delegated Sam’s work to Chantelle and Chantelle’s work to Sam, unfortunately I’d have had to pick up the slack for one of the posters either way but as team leader, if a member of my team fails then we should pull together to ensure the objectives are still achieved though this wasn’t possible given the short time scales we had to operate under. To give credit where it’s due, however, Chantelle has some excellent ideas and had a huge amount of input into the first task we did where we made a shoe using paper, though it did take her a while to get to grips with what it is we were doing. Khalid is very obedient and has adequate research skills but lacks the creative aspect, as I would argue I also lack the creative traits needed in such tasks; I do think, however, that I have a very strategic mind that allows me to suggest alternative solutions than those that are immediately present, such as using the sticky insides of marshmallows to ‘cement’ together spaghetti which, in fairness, was a happy accident of a discovery. Sam has a very technical way of looking at things in the sense where nothing is black and white, if it wasn’t for Sam, we would have had a pyramid shaped tower that was three times smaller than what it was because Sam was able to see where extra spaghetti was needed and what we ended up with was a tower with multiple storeys and what I would think of as to scaffolding to support the weight of the upper levels.

    Stage Four: Performing:

        This is the point where the team leader should be able to step back and watch the team function like a well-oiled machine where everybody understands why they are doing what they are doing and what they need to do to achieve the common goals of the group. What we find in this stage is that processes run far more smoothly than they did in the forming, storming or norming stage because we have developed a relationship between the team members where each person is aware of where they stand in the group. Now, the leader can simply watch and delegate at times where the team may be veering off track or behind schedule, in fact, all the team leader is responsible for now is ensuring a continued smooth relationship between the members and ensuring the project is completed on time. Team members may ask for assistance but mostly, this assistance will be in regards to personal and interpersonal development, according to BusinessBalls.com.

    Stage Five: Adjourning:

        In the mid 1970’s, our pal, Tuckman, refined his model to include the fifth and final stage of adjourning. This is simply where the team breaks up after, hopefully, achieving their goals successfully and this is where the team members move on to new projects or focus on other projects they are already working on. I can appreciate fully why this stage was added to the model. If we look at any teams we have been a part of in the past, how many of them have birthed friendships outside of the team environment? Very rarely, in my case at least. Myself, Sam, Khalid and Chantelle, to the best of my knowledge anyway, neither of us are friends outside of college to the extent where we socialise on a regular basis, in fact, since those team activities, the amount of interactions we have had as individuals with one another can be counted on one hand. When a team adjourns, it is seldom that the team will come back together as one in a social setting and that is why this stage is so important, without it, it implies teams remain together and the relationships between team members does not diminish when in fact it does. Two people who detest one another can co-operate wonderfully in a team together but once that team adjourns, the relationship between the two will more than likely revert to exactly how it was previously.

    In 1993, Meredith Belbin published his Theory of Team Roles, Belbin defines a team role as “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.” His study, conducted over 30 years, involved observing managers from a range of industries and concluded that, for any team to be a success, it must have access to all nine team roles identified by Belbin and typically, any individual may possess two or three Belbin Team Roles, some that they can manage if they have to and the rest they’d rather not adopt at all; this begins to clarify the importance of having a diverse team.

    The nine roles Belbin identified fit into three distinct categories; action oriented team roles, people oriented team roles and cerebral team roles. Below, we will go on to explain each role in detail in their respective category;

Action Oriented Team Roles:

• Shaper: Shapers provide the drive necessary to ensure the team keeps moving and does not lose focus of their objective. They will be challenging and dynamic, they’ll also work well under pressure and be able to overcome obstacles. At the same time, they are prone to provocation and can often seem offensive or aggressive in their attempts to meet their objective.
• Implementer: Implementers are needed to plan a strategy that will allow them to meet their goals. They are usually reliable, efficient, practical and will turn ideas into actions and organises work appropriately. At the same time, they can be inflexible and slow to respond to respond to new ideas, especially if these new ideas are generated later. They will be stubborn and won’t want to change their plans to incorporate better ideas; once their mind had been made up, they will be slow to relinquish their plans in favour of positive changes.
• Completer Finisher: As the name suggests, the completer finisher is most effectively utilised at the end of a task, they will put work under scrutiny to identify faults or errors. They can be prone to worrying without needing to and they’re often reluctant to delegate work, instead preferring to perfect work themselves that may not be to the highest standard they demand. They may also be considered too much of a perfectionist to the point where they may even hinder the team’s ability to meet their objective on time.

People Oriented Team Roles:

• Co-Ordinator: Co-ordinators are needed to help focus the team members on the tasks they have been given, co-ordinators are often the ones to delegate the majority of the work within a team. They are often confident, mature and are able to identify talent amongst the group. However, they can also seem manipulative and may even offload their work to someone else whilst claiming they have too much of a responsibility to oversee the group leaving themselves very little work to do themselves.
• Team Worker: Team workers bring the team together, they are versatile in their abilities to identify the work required and complete it on behalf of the team, often picking up the slack of other team members. They are co-operative, diplomatic, attentive and able to lessen friction between other team members. However, they may be slightly indecisive, especially when under pressure and they are known to avoid confrontation by simply agreeing with another team member even if they feel themselves that the idea or opinion of the said team member isn’t the right decision. They will be hesitant to make unpopular decisions.
• Resource Investigator: Resource investigators are naturally inquisitive in their nature to find ideas to bring back to the team. They will often be enthusiastic and outgoing with a high degree of self-confidence. They explore options before committing themselves to something. They may, however, be over-optimistic and can often lose interest in a project halfway through. Though in business, they are fantastic at developing contacts and leads, it would be unsurprising if they failed to follow up on good leads.

Cerebral Team Roles:

• Plant: Plants tend to hold the creative qualities a team may need, they are good at solving problems and often turn to unconventional means to find a solution to a problem. They are creative, imaginative and able to think freely for themselves without other people being able to influence plants with their someone else’s individual biases and instead, rely on evidential reasoning to form their own conclusions and opinions. They may also ignore incidentals and may be too preoccupied with their own individual tasks to communicate effectively with others within their team. Forgetfulness is also often associated with plants.
• Monitor Evaluator: Monitor Evaluators provide a logical view of situations and makes impartial decisions when the team cannot collectively agree on something, they weigh up options by evaluating team member’s strengths and weaknesses and makes decisions and forms opinions based on evidence. They are known for their strategic abilities and sees all options available and makes a judgement on what is best for the team accurately with a high degree of success. They do sometimes lack a drive and ability to inspire others and can be overly critical of people’s efforts.
• Specialist: Specialists bring a large amount of in-depth knowledge about one or more specific key areas to the team, they’re usually self-motivated, dedicated and are on hand to provide specialist knowledge and skills but they do tend to contribute on a very small range of areas and can over complicate things and focus too much on technicalities and are prone to overloading team members with too much information.

Chapter 3: Team Leadership and Management Styles

    When it comes to team leadership, there are several personality traits, skills and styles that may be present in different types of team leader, depending on the objective of the team however, certain personality traits can interrupt a team leader’s ability to lead and guide their team but we will discuss this later in the chapter.

    Leadership styles were first defined in 1939 by Kurt Lewin, a psychologist with his own team of researchers who most likely operated on a matrix team basis. Lewin said people aren’t just born leaders, they could be made into leaders; this set precedent for similar theories and opinions, including Peter Jones’ “entrepreneurs aren’t born. THEY’RE MADE!” tagline for the Peter Jones’ Enterprise Academy. Lewin and his researchers developed three distinct leadership style from their studies, these were; Autocratic, Democratic and the Laissez-faire Approach.

        Autocratic Leadership Style: One person takes control of the group and makes all the decisions whilst directing others in their chosen course of action. This kind of leadership is often found in manufacturing industries, especially those teams working on product lines in factories making the same product repeatedly. Quite often, and I feel the same from my own experiences of working on production lines and lower level positions within factories that required little responsibility, teams working under an autocratic leader lack satisfaction in their job and often resent their leader and in some cases, their job.

        Democratic Leadership Style: Like the autocratic leadership style, one person takes control of the group but instead of dictating his instructions to his team for them to carry out obediently, a democratic leader will be open to group input and often allow the group to come together and make decisions collectively. Quite often, there is a large measure of team satisfaction in these kinds of groups and this is because a democratic leader guides their team instead of directing them and individual team members have a portion of responsibility when it comes to meeting their objectives.

        Laissez-faire Approach: The laissez-faire approach translates from French to “Live and let live”, according to Wikipedia or “Let’s do it” according to Google Translate, though Wikipedia is often arguably mistaken and not a very reliable source at times, I am inclined to take their translation as opposed to Google’s on this occasion as it is more fitting for the definition of this approach. The laissez-faire approach can almost describe the team leader lazy but it may be a case of inexperience or a lack of confidence or ability to assert themselves as the authority within the team. In this leadership style, there is again only one person who leads the team and they basically sit back and do nothing, they provide little to no guidance or direction whatsoever and the group falls into disarray, they are unproductive and disorganised and as tasks near their deadline (as quite often, they are rarely near completion before the deadline in this kind of leadership style) anxiety and stress heightens amongst team members and possibly the team leader; similar to student types who revise for exams only on the night before they are due to sit an exam. In this leadership style, it is likely the team leader would lay blame on their team members instead of taking responsibility for their own lack of leadership if an objective was not achieved. Sometimes, however, team leaders who follow this approach may do so because of the frustration they exhibit at an overall unproductive team (as sometimes, it’s the personal traits of individual team members that can hinder a team’s progress) so what happens is, the team leader more or less gives up their control and what happens is the same as when a teacher leaves the students alone in the classroom, some will stop working and become disruptive whereas others will continue with their work until the task is completed or they are dismissed. If a team leader is rather timid in their personality or lacks confidence or simply doesn’t gain the respect of their team members in the forming stage of team development, and happens to have the kind of team comprised of those described as the former student type when a teacher leaves them alone in a classroom, the team would simply be destined to fail. As mentioned, the group is disorganised and unproductive but satisfaction is high in the initial stages of group formation but as stress and anxiety increase, satisfaction begins to rapidly decline over time.

    In the 1970’s through to the 1980’s, concepts of situational leadership were introduced by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in their model ‘The Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory’, in a nutshell, the theory discusses different types of more modern leadership that are compatible with different people, in other words choosing the right leadership style for the right people. The theory suggests that team leaders adapt their leadership style to fit the environment they are in and the objectives they have to achieve alongside adapting to the situations they find themselves in; an autocratic style, for example, would be more effective on a production line packing turkeys in time for Christmas whereas a democratic style may be more fitting for a team working for the local authority tasked with planning the renovation of the Haymarket Bus Station in Leicester.

    The theory also suggests leadership approaches can be influenced by the personnel both involved in the team, like I mentioned earlier in the laissez-faire approach, your team can be extremely disruptive and uncooperative with the team leader and each other which could influence an autocratic or democratic leader, or other type of leader we will discuss shortly, to simply give up on their team and adopt the laissez-faire style of leadership. A cooperative, responsive team member may need little support or guidance from their leader after the initial instructions are given whereas another team leader who isn’t as responsive, may require a more a more authoritative team leader to repeat instructions and advice several times.

    There are several pros and cons to this theory, they are set out below;

Pros

Cons

The simplicity of the theory makes it easy to apply.

The theory has simple scales that a leader can use to give a “thumb in the wind” assessment of what leadership style to use.

Maturity and competence of the group are often overlooked factors in good leadership and it helps to focus on these.

The theory may not be applicable to managers as administrators or those with limited power but in structurally in a leadership position.

There are situations in which the theory may be less applicable such as those involving time constraints and task complexity.

Testing of the theory doesn’t seem to bear out the predictions

The contents in this table were sourced from Leadership-Central.com. All other work contained in this document are my own – Andrew Hill.

Credits:

Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory 
Author: Paul Hersey, professor and author of the book Situational Leader, and Ken Blanchard, leadership guru and author of The One Minute Manager 
Classification: Contingency Theories
Year: 1970s and early 1980s
http://www.leadership-central.com/situational-leadership-theory.html#ixzz4Z2ijct9F

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    In a 1960’s book, ‘The Social Side of Enterprise’, a social psychologist, Douglas McGregor, described his now famous XY Theory of leadership styles. This theory is referred to often in management training and has set a basic principle of what traits a good team leader will exhibit depending on the management style required in a particular role. However, recently, some studies have questioned the logic behind this theory with a revision being added to the theory later by somebody else but more on this later. The original XY Theory still remains one of the core resources used to identify the types of team leaders within organisations and is essential to organisational development and improving the culture within organisations on all levels and importantly, for the team members working under their team leaders. McGregor theorised there were two fundamental and distinctive approaches to managing people with most managers fitting into theory X and generally get very poor results except for in certain industries, such that manufacturing, and often, team members under team leaders who fit into theory X have a large amount of resentment and contempt for their leader. Theory Y produces better results and allows the people within the team to develop and grow and become stronger over time with little resentment for the team leader.

Theory X:

        Theory X is an authoritative leadership style and can be likened to the autocratic leadership style. In the tertiary sector, this management style is least effective. Team members under Theory X will likely dislike their work and leader, as well as their employer and job to the point where they will do what they can to avoid it, I was like this when I worked for an agency in one of their client’s factories, I would tell them I had a bout of sickness and diarrhoea knowing they would give me two weeks off (unpaid, of course) without repercussion. The average person who fits Theory X will avoid responsibility and lack ambition and self-motivation and will be motivated by fear or reward.

Theory Y:

    Team members and leaders who fit Theory Y will be naturally self-motivated at work, they will apply self-control and self-direction and won’t need external motivation by the threat of punishment or promise of reward. The Theory Y teams will be committed to achieving their objective and will find great satisfaction from the progress they make towards their objectives. People under Theory Y will seek responsibility and will have the capacity to make logical decisions without influence or guidance from their team leader or peers. Theory Y teams often fit a matrix team style with team members and leaders coming together collectively to utilise one another’s skills effectively and to their advantage as it is expected that not every single member of a team will have great problem solving skills, ingenuity, creativity and ability to remain focused. In an environment requiring planning and a degree of academic intelligence, theory Y works best and is not compatible in the entry level employment settings, in these kind of settings, intellectual potential is wasted as work is often mind-numbingly repetitive.

Theory Z:

William Ouchi, a professor of Management at the UCLA, Los Angeles, wrote a book named ‘Theory Z’, one can only assume, given its name, that it is a successor of Theory X and Y. In fact, reading the book, it becomes apparent that it encompasses the best of Theory Y, the effective parts of Theory X and Theory Z also places more reliance on the attitude and responsibilities of the team members and leader, in other words, Theory Z explores how the management styles of theory X and Y can be adapted and combined to form the Theory Z management style which in itself is adaptable depending on the individual team member’s attitude, responsibilities and personality traits and behaviours.

    Moving on to the traits a leader may (or should, one could argue) have in order to be a successful team leader, in an Inc.com article, Peter Economy listed the qualities he believed made great leaders, he encourages the embodiment of the following qualities and traits to achieve the best results from your team, these traits and qualities are;

• Awareness – The ability to realise any faults or potential risks to the success completion of your teams’ objective.
• Decisiveness – The ability to make difficult decisions under pressure.
• Focus – If as a team leader you are unfocused, your team will follow suit.
• Accountability – The ability to take blame for your own mistakes and also the ability to proportion blame fairly to each individual team member based on genuine reasons.
• Empathy – The ability to understand and appreciate team members’ feelings and opinions and ideas whilst also being able to empathise with the end user of the team member’s objective.
• Confidence.
• Optimism – Pessimism will make your team members question their own abilities and your abilities as team leader.
• Honesty, and;
• Inspirational.

Alongside these qualities, there are several more traits that come into play between team members to make them effective, these are;

• Communication – It’s key in any team formation in any setting, including outside of business, referees and those working on the side lines of a football match will communicate using flags, a whistle and coloured cards to let each other, other players and spectators what decisions are being made in regards to fouling, off-sides and throw-ins, corners and goal kicks.
• Expertise in different fields – Especially important in the medical industry, a team of medical consultants would come together to assess a person who suffers from something like AIDS or cancer, they may need a team of consultants who specialise in several areas of the body that could be affected by such viruses or diseases. And;
• Ability to work under pressure and adapt to changing team environments – At some stage of any team project, there will be stress and changes made, someone building a tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows, for example, could find themselves deciding the original plan isn’t going to work and having to make the choice of starting again or adapting our plan to incorporate the mess they had already made, this will put a lot of stress under the person needing to make the decision and the builders.

    So, can leadership skills be learned? The way team leaders act towards their team members and how productively they work and how much effort they put into a task can both depend on the level of authority the team leader possesses, or as social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven would say, both can depend on the team leader’s source of power and this power doesn’t have to be due to any official title or status. French and Raven’s research helps us understand why some leaders can influence and why some simply can’t garner any respect from or authority over their team members and how team leaders can develop new bases of power and how prepared team members may be to accept you as their team leader.

    So, French and Raven’s research, back in 1959, identified six individual bases of power with the sixth being added six years after the initial study was published and by understanding these bases of power, we can learn to use the positive ones and avoid those that aren’t which some managers may instinctively rely on; these bases of power are:

1.Legitimate: This power base comes from the team members believing the person leading their team has been officially placed in that position to do so. This means if you aren’t credible in your roles as a team leader in the sense where you haven’t got a person in a more senior position of authority that can confirm you are indeed the team leader, your legitimacy can come into question amongst team members. This can also instil a sense of authority in team leaders knowing they have been put in the position of team leader.
2.Reward: This power base results from a team leader’s ability to compensate a member of their team for compliance, in other words, it is positive reinforcement; the same as you would reward a litter training kitten when they use the litter box. The point is, reward shows a level of gratitude for a team member’s effort to do things the way you, as a team leader, want them to be done.
3.Expert: This is based on a team leader’s level of high skill, knowledge or experienced and is especially drawn upon by those leading teams of less experienced and less capable team members.
4.Referent: This power base is the result of the team member’s perception of their team leader and their opinion of their leader’s worthiness and right to their respect. It can also result from a leader’s perception of themselves and from this, their right to respect from their team members.
5.Coercive: Opposite to reward, this is negative reinforcement, in a business environment, the fear of punishment for non-compliance may be enough.
6.Informational: This results from a person’s ability to control who knows what within the team in order to accomplish something, the idea of “knowledge being power” comes into play here. A team leader may retain power over their team members by not revealing everything they, as a team leader, know, such as the complete instructions at the beginning of a task to ensure team members do not undermine their team leader’s authority and deviate from the leader’s plan to proceed with their own route to achieving the team’s objective, this was evidenced wonderfully by our tutor in one team building exercise in class involving Lego bricks by deliberately withholding vital instructions and only relaying them to the team members of each team in separate stages instead of all at once to deliberately disrupt our projects, for example; our tutor would tell us to build a house with x amount of rooms, large enough (including roof) to fit a Lego man standing up in; halfway through installing the roof, he would give further instruction that it needs to be two storeys and have one wall made entirely out of the same colour bricks and install windows. This has the benefit of ensuring tasks are complete the way you want them to be and without any shortcuts. A team leader can also benefit from this power base in the case of inexperienced team members who will draw on the team member’s knowledge and experience but on the other hand, if the team members are more knowledgeable than the team leader is, it is likely to bring the team leader’s credibility into question.

Next, we will discuss John Adair’s Action-Centred Leadership Model, a simple blueprint for the leadership and management of any team. Adair, in his model, argues that good managers and leaders will have full control over three main areas of the model and should be able to use each area according to the situation they find their team in and in being able to control these areas, it gets better results, build and sustains moral amongst team members, develops teams and increases overall productivity, the three areas show the mark of a successful manager or team leader.

The three areas of Adair’s model are presented in a Venn diagram (see below) with each overlapping section illustrating three core management responsibilities and the famous “three circles” models is one of the most iconic and recognisable symbols within management theory. The Venn diagram, set out by Adair, is shown below:

The top section, “Task”, refers to achieving the task. The bottom left section, “Team”, refers to managing the team collectively and the final, bottom right section refers to managing individual team members. Adair trademarked the image of his model as it perfectly reflects the equal amounts of balance required between each section to manage a team effectively whilst at the same time, keeping the team focused on the task.

John Adair’s work, inspired largely by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (which we will briefly cover later in this chapter), shows that achieving the task is mutually as important as and dependent upon the development of a team on the whole and developing individual team members; one could infer that achieving the objective is still held most importantly for Adair, as this was placed at the top of his Venn diagram but with that being said, Venn diagrams aren’t typically used to show categories based on priority or importance. They are all also mutually dependent as well as separately important to the overall leadership role, if a leader lacks a certain section, for example the inability to relate to their team members and thus, hindering their own ability to develop individual team members, their success as a team leader may be impeded as a result. In Adair’s model, he sets out core functions of leadership and management (some of which are similar to those covered in Tuckman’s theory of team development) and he believes they are vital to the overall structural integrity of his model, these are;

• Planning: This function refers to the information gathering, setting of goals, aims and objectives (with goals being what they hope to achieve upon completion of their objective, the aim being how they hope to arrive at their objective and their objective being the thing they critically have to achieve). This is similar to the Forming Stage of Tuckman’s theory.
• Initiating: This function refers to the briefing of team members, delegation of work amongst team members and setting the standards of work expected.
• Controlling: This function refers to the maintaining of the standards set in the previous function, ensuring progress is maintained by guiding team members where necessary and whilst this function is being carried out, very little initiative is given from the team members and the team leader will be making ongoing decisions. This function is similar to the Storming stage of Tuckman’s theory.
• Supporting: This functions refers to taking on board team members’ contributions, rewarding good work and encouraging other team members to do better, it is also the function of motivating team members, keeping morale up when mistakes are made and helping team members to remain on task. Whilst this function is being carried out, team members will begin to use their own initiative and begin to make their own decisions where appropriate. This function is similar to the Norming stage of Tuckman’s theory.
• Informing: This function is about clarifying tasks and ensuring team members are still on task, receiving updates from and giving updates to team members as well as giving and receiving feedback and interpreting this feedback to improve the team’s productivity before the final function. This function is similar to the Performing stage of Tuckman’s theory.
• Evaluating: This function is carried out at the end of the task or at the end of each stage of the task, it is about reflecting back on the teams work and establishing the overall success of their plan, how well they performed and otherwise enables self-assessment, this is the part where team members and the team leader can assess whether or not their goals, aims and objectives had been met. This function is similar to the Adjourning stage of Tuckman’s theory.

Because of these functions, and their similarity to other leadership models and theories, the Action Centred Leadership Model therefore does not stand alone and instead, must part of an integrated approach to management and leadership. The principles of this model should be emphasised strongly throughout team leadership and management training but it is equally important to understand other theories, especially those that influenced and inspired Adair’s own work, such as Abraham Maslow.

    Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist most notable for the psychological theory titled Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs, published in 1943, and shows the basic needs a person requires to achieve full and proper motivation to achieve tasks, however you also have to achieve certain needs before you will be able to progress up the pyramid, it is only once you have reached the top of the pyramid that full self-motivation has been achieved; he sets these needs out in a pyramid to represent the most difficult to achieve need at the top and the (he argues) easily achieved need at the bottom. The pyramid is set out below with the life:

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    So, to allow understanding of the pyramid, I will explain each section:

• Basic Needs:
1.Physiological needs: Food, Water, Warmth and Rest: Physiological needs have to be met. As the Mars’ family know, you aren’t yourself when you’re hungry, as depicted by their product, Snicker’s tagline, therefore, food is a must. If you’re hungry, you can’t adequately function and be productive as your survival instincts try to overpower your ability to function in the task you are currently working on whether it’s at work or in your personal life (remember, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was never intended to be used in a business environment, instead, it was created to better understand motivation in humans in general), the same goes for if you’re thirsty, cold or tired.
2.Safety Needs: Security and Safety: If you are a new employee in a factory where DBS checks aren’t required and there is someone who works in the same factory as you and you know them to be a genuinely bad person and for whatever reason, you do not feel safe going to work but you still force yourself to because you have bills to pay, your fear of this person will impede any chance you have to succeed in your role and be productive as you will constantly be looking over your shoulder instead of focusing on the task at hand. Likewise, if you live in a hostel and in that hostel there is a large concentration of criminals, you won’t be able to focus on attending local authority appointments to assist you in finding suitable, stable and permanent accommodation as you will have to keep an eye on your belongings which, short of putting in a shopping trolley and taking them all with you whenever you go out, would get stolen if you let your guard down for just a second – this was my experience in the first hostel I ever lived in, I left that hostel owning nothing but a few pairs of clothes after all of my other belongings were stolen, it was a youth hostel, shared rooms, hostel staff recommended 15-17 year olds purchase home contents insurance as they took no liability because for those barely entitled to state assistance, home contents insurance (with premiums for the fact it’s a hostel) is a logical, easily affordable expense… For me, this need was met in my next hostel where I had a shared room but my roommate could be trusted to ensure the door was locked behind him and he wasn’t likely to accidentally-on-purpose leave it unlocked for the other residents who have lighter fingers, plus by this point, with him only owning a small box TV and clothes and toiletries, he still owned more than me.
• Psychological Needs:
1.Belongingness and need of love: Intimate relationships, friendships: This need refers to a person’s desire to be accepted by others and to have a fulfilling relationship with another person (or persons depending on how open-minded an individual they and their partner(s) are), it’s the need for physical affection and comforting from others when things aren’t as positive as they were the day before. If you do not have a sense of belonging, you will find it difficult to enjoy the tasks you are carrying out.
2.Esteem Needs: Prestige and feeling of accomplishment: This need refers to the need of recognition of one’s accomplishments. If you have studied a PhD in kale, apparently, a superfood, and wind up taking a temporary job working in a factory making paper poppies for Royal British Legion, your esteem needs will not be met. Your lifestyle would not be representative of your accomplishment and doing such a job for a prolonged period of time will eventually demotivate you to the extent your life-progress may actually start to rescind. This need also refers to a person’s need to be respected, police officers are prone to lack the respect they quite frankly deserve (most of the time) and unsurprisingly, public service officials (including paramedics, NHS staff and council service advisers) are among the highest amount of people to be diagnosed with work-place attributed depression, the reasons are unclear but I for one, taking into account Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs, can appreciate why given the amount of abuse they are given at work by customers and service users, their esteem needs simply aren’t being met.

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• Self-fulfilment Needs:
1.Self-Actualisation Needs: Achieving one’s full potential, including creative activities: This need refers to the need of self-fulfilment, further lifestyle enrichment and seeking personal growth and new experiences. This is the stage of the pyramid where a person can focus less on their basic and less basic but still critical needs and more on their less important needs, such as developing interpersonal skills to improve their ability to fulfil their basic needs or simply, fulfilling materialistic needs.

A year after Maslow published his iconic pyramid, he extended it with three further categories of need. These are;

• Cognitive Needs: This refers to the need to continue learning and keeping the brain active. People who are bored with their lives simply have not met their cognitive needs. I personally feel this need is never fulfilled because as we become more expert in a particular subject, the world continues to change.
• Aesthetic Needs: This is the need for things to be pleasing to the eye, the search for beauty in balance. This need can be demonstrated when a person goes shopping for décor, their needs simply aren’t met by the ugly piece of mass produced wall art and yet they buy it anyway because it’s different, over time they begin to get frustrated with looking at the same dull surroundings of their home with the ugly wall art they purchased for no reason staring blankly back at them, the person’s sense of belonging begins to diminish over time as a result of this need not being met, this shows evidence of how needs can interfere with one another when a need isn’t being met.
• Transcendence Needs: This refers to the need to help others reach Self-actualisation, typically by helping them to achieve other needs such as basic or psychological needs.

So, in a nutshell, that’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but there’s not much substance without understanding Maslow himself. So, instead of focusing on what can go wrong in a person and their behaviour and instead of looking at psychopathology (which most psychologists do look at), Maslow instead focused on what can go right in a person and their behaviour, he formulated a much more positive account as Maslow was interested in human potential and how we fulfil it instead of being interested in how to fix what’s wrong with people. He believed that human motivation is based on people seeking fulfilment and change through personal-growth instead of changing their environment and/or situation around them, for someone with a negative personality, such as those categorised as a psychopath (defined medically; those who intend to commit an action that is wrong, either legally or morally, but do not understand mentally that the action itself is wrong or why it is wrong. Different from Sociopaths who intend to commit an action that is wrong and fully understand that the action is wrong, why it is wrong yet still continue to commit the action anyway), a doctor may prescribe therapy that will assist the person to change their external environment to fix an internal issue, in the cases of drug addicts, they are far less likely to recover if they continue to return to the environment they know as a drug addict, whereby they will maintain the same friendships with fellow drug addicts and therefore, maintain their connection with their dealers and over time, succumb to their addiction again. Moving on, Maslow believed self-actualised people are those who are fulfilled and doing all they are possibly capable of, people reach this position through personal growth and through discoveries they make through their life. Self-actualised people, in other words, have found meaning and purpose to their life, something which many forty year olds and over have not yet managed to find…

Next we will discuss very briefly due to time constraints Tannenbaum’s leadership theory, I feel it’s appropriate to mention here that this has nothing to do with Christmas trees (a small joke there as Tannenbaum translates from German to English as Christmas Tree, according to Google… Moving on). This theory is very simple to understand and is basically depicted as an oblong with a bisect line from one vertices to the other; the top half represents a manager’s use of authority over the area of freedom for their subordinates but what does that mean? Basically, the more freedom a team leader gives to their team leader, the less authority over the team they will have and vice versa; however, regardless of how much or how little authority the team leader/manager relinquishes by giving freedom to their team, the team leader/manager retain full responsibility for the success (or failure) of the task and therefore should not be too easy to give over complete freedom because irrespective of any delegation of fault, authority or freedom, the manger/team leader retains full accountability. < NOTE to self: Revise this paragraph during resubmission, give further and full explanation of theory, also talk about Schmidt’s involvement and other work Tannenbaum has done in regards to management and leadership.

Team leadership is one of the most important aspects of an organisations capacity and ability to reach their short and long term goals but can management and team leadership skills be learned or are team leaders and managers simply born? Well, if we take into account all of the models and theories explored here, we can come to the conclusion that yes, the skills and attributes of leaders and managers can be learned the same as you can learn to play the guitar or drive a car. Natural born leaders often fall under X theory of Douglas McGregor’s theory and as we now know, those managers tend to have the least happy subordinates so if I had to choose between being born a leader or learning to become a leader, I’d choose the latter every time.

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Report:

    In this report, I will use the information provided in the manual to provide three examples of established teams that I have been part of and analyse each type of team, the development they have gone through and the type of leadership style they have.

    The first team we will analyse is the very first team I was ever really a part of, being rather chunky in primary and secondary school, whose weight superseded their age at thirteen years old, I was always one of the last to be picked for teams at school so we will be going ahead to my fourteenth year when I first entered employment in Stagg Hairstyles as a weekend salon assistant, that’s the glorified title of cleaner, tea maker, phone answerer and hair washer, that was the extent of my job description, I got the job after having my hair cut from elbow length to schoolboy length – now you can begin to really understand why I was last to be picked for teams but that’s neither here nor there, on Saturdays, the glorified hair washer, John a stylist and the assistant manager I would later join on the same level within the salon and Geraldine, the boss and head stylist, together we operated a very much functional project team when I was fourteen years old though I like to think this adapted from a project team to a matrix team later as I was promoted through the business; we would work together when times were really busy on a Saturday evening in the run up to Christmas where we would often work beyond 9pm, four hours after our official closing time, with me taking clients from John who would apply colour and I would set them under a heat lamp after removing a client and placing her at the basin ready for me to wash their hair, the client whose hair I had just washed before taking the client from John would have been passed on to Geraldine who would cut and style the hair (I would take over this role alongside my hair washing duty the following years after) before passing them back to John who would be able to take payment, I would then wash my client’s hair and again, pass them on to Geraldine; we were like a well-oiled machine, Geraldine and John would both observe each other and me to ensure they would speed up or slow down cutting or applying colour to their client’s hair so they both finished in time with me washing my client’s hair and each other, I’m talking about when I am fourteen years old still and as I was inexperienced at this age, I was unable to monitor my co-workers to finish in time with them though I did pick it up in future years.

    By the time I became assistant manager and colour technician, we were employing Groupon and Wowcher to offer deals to entice more customers, our most popular sales came from customers who wanted a cut and colour, even though our target market was mostly older customers, we attracted all sorts due to the quirky environment, it was located in Leicester city centre, the premises is now owned by my second boss, Victoria Nonnay which isn’t relevant but she does want me to go back to work for her, Groupon and Wowcher simultaneously run an offer for cut and colour for £14 due to a poor mistake we, as a salon, made when first trying these services (sales people from both companies approached us within a week and we accepted both) without realising how much of a response we would gain as a result. What happened was an absolute nightmare, bad reviews were coming in due to the mess the small salon would become during its peak times with hair on the floor, equipment all over the place and people were complaining to us and the voucher companies so we had them on our case too, in the end we stopped dealing with Wowcher as we had a better response from Groupon in the end. As a team, we had to adapt drastically to accommodate the customers and because I have never been confident cutting hair and these customers were easy to complain to the third party company in order to get a refund for whatever reason (as some refunds which were given seemed to be Groupon customers abusing Groupon’s refund policy, the same was exhibited in Wowcher’s customers too), it was down to Geraldine and John to cut hair whilst I applied colour and finished the styling of the hair (blow drying, straightening or curling, etc.) after it was cut, in hindsight, it is more likely to be that everyone was doing each other’s roles at times with the exception of me not cutting hair whereas the other two were).

    Our team developed over the course of time that I worked at Stagg Hairstyles, Geraldine (the boss) was a fantastic team leader at the beginning. We had our ups and downs and I wrongly resented her near the end of Stagg’s life, she was very educational and allowed me to explore my own initiative and make mistakes; rather than discipline me, she would allow me to realise how I had made the mistake and helped me to learn from it, something no employer I have had since has had the patience to do. Near the end of Stagg Hairstyles’ lifespan, however, her ability as a team leader began to diminish, the voucher websites were a major factor and the only factor I will discuss in the decline of the business because it took our focus away from our regular customers who, whenever we had a break from Wowcher and Groupon, never returned with the exception of a handful, one of whom was Marge, she lives in a residential home for the elderly now and suffers for dementia but she was a lovely, energetic lady who told me the proper way to make a cup of tea using a tea bag (tea bag, hot water, let it infuse for four minutes or more or less depending on desired strength, remove tea bag, add sugar or honey so it can dissolve in the hot water and only then is it permissible to add milk), me and John would work really closely together to ensure Marge had the very best customer experience, to Geraldine, she was just one of many elderly clients but to me and John, we would have debates over who she liked more, she was certainly both of our favourite clients. Nearer the end, as I say, the team spirit did deteriorate and eventually, the salon closed and we all went our separate ways. Just like in Tuckman’s theory, we went through every stage together only, I would argue, we skipped the storming stage until the end of our working relationship. Myself and John are in irregular contact but I would say we are very good friends. I have absolute respect for Geraldine but unfortunately, the last thing we said to one another was her telling me that the salon was closing.

    The next team I will talk about was the functional project team I was part of on a production line making sandwiches for Tesco, I despised my team leader but I had respect for those above him who worked for the Samworth Brother’s factory I was employed at, though I was employed by the agency Al A Carte, I didn’t like them either; my team leader was very autocratic and demanding, constantly breathing down our necks like so much could go wrong whilst putting slices of cucumber in each corner and the centre of a slice of bread with tuna-mayo paste fresh from a machine and spread by a machine on a production line. There were twenty-odd of us on a production line, someone would place bread onto the conveyor belt that would pass under a machine that would squirt and spread the tuna-mayo on the bread (the same machine is used, washed first obviously, on the cheese and onion sandwiches) which would be carried on to someone who would add the cucumber, then another person would add the last slice of bread and another person would rotate it so it’s corner is facing front before it passed through a rotary blade (the same a builder would use to cut a pipe, well, similar I suppose) that would slice it (mind you, it wouldn’t be doing a very good job if you passed anything through a rotary blade and it came out the other side still intact), then it would go on to another person who would place both halves next to each other so a corner is pointing up, and the sliced edge is on the bottom, then someone will put it into a cardboard box that will pass through a heat sealing machine and under some flaps to whoever knows where, well, I do because I worked in production, hygiene and dispatch within the factory, so it goes onto a chap in dispatch who places the boxed sandwiches into an even bigger box and onto someone else who puts them in a cage and onto someone else who wraps them in Clingfilm and into a loading area to be sorted onto trucks, I can tell you some disgusting stories of things people do to sandwiches in those food production factories but now is not the time. The team developed quickly through the stages of development Tuckman identified, completely skipping the performing stage and arguably, the forming stage as when I started employment and was placed on that production line, the team was already established. The team was productive though morale was very low, our team leader, as did all production line team leaders in the same factory, followed the X style of management defined in Douglas McGregor’s XY Theory of management styles, this was due to his autocratic style of leadership and the team leaders lack of freedom. Our team leader delegated work to us and we carried it out like drones, the role was not at all intellectually challenging and after two weeks of working in a factory like that, you’ll begin to feel stupider. I left that role because I simply did not find it fulfilling, if we look as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I did not achieve my security needs as the agency offered work only on an adhoc basis, I was not guaranteed work if I turned up, if I wasn’t needed I’d be sent home with no compensation for travel expenses, I daresay that’s illegal given some of the employee rights tribunals we’ve had in the media lately but moving on, because my security needs weren’t met and neither were my psychological needs being met due to no sense of belonging (as I am far too intellectual to work in such a monotonous role) and my self-esteem was low because I was working for less than minimum wage some days.

    The final team I will analyse is that which I was part of when I worked in Nottingham as a door to door Fundraiser for Home Fundraising on behalf of voluntary services overseas, where I boast the most sign ups that day on the day before I left for my company in my region, my team leader’s name was James and James had very little experience comparative to my own in terms of knocking on doors, sales and even time spent working. We were supposed to be a functional project team, though it may as well had been a Matrix team due to lack of experience. This was his first job and he had been working for Home Fundraising for 9 weeks, recently dropping out of university himself a few months before. Because of his position of power given to him by Home Fundraising, he developed a very arrogant attitude due to his position, if we look at French and Raven’s theory, he would fit into the legitimate and coercive category in their style of leadership. There was very little, if anything, that James could teach me and because of his arrogance and undeserved authority, there was a lot of friction between us, the only commonplace we had was cats, we both like cats but I also like dogs and he doesn’t and frankly, you can’t trust someone who doesn’t like dogs or at least doesn’t have a good reason to not like dogs, he didn’t have a reason, he “just didn’t like them”. James also hoped to seek his power from the information power base as defined in French and Raven’s research but as I mentioned, he drew his power from legitimacy and by being coercive, he couldn’t use information as a source of power because he was not a credible team leader, the only leading he did was leading us to the street we were knocking doors on, he had no expertise or experience comparative to me, even though he believed he had in his 9 weeks of working three days out of 6 a week… But that’s neither here nor there. Give him his dues, he did try his best it’s just, I was better and that’s unfortunate for him as a team leader however, I’d never say any of this in front of our employers because I believe in a roles of sales or fundraising, to do so would be catastrophic for his career because sales people, whether you’re selling or seeking donations, self-esteem is critical, it would be top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs if I had my way when it comes to sales. Instead, I would empower James to be the very best leader he can be, in fact when asked how I had secured so many sign ups in my first week, I attributed it to how my team leader allowed me to find my own flow on the doorsteps encompassed with my previous sales experience; it has to be said, however, door to door fundraising is completely different to door to door sales, it requires a complete different skillset.

    To conclude, we have explored many different theories and models of team work and leadership, we have also explored team development and how these models and theories apply to real life situations, we have worked together as teams in lesson which has enabled us to really understand how teams work and how different people in the team are responsible for different roles and tasks. It is apparent that many models and theories can work in conjunction with one another as well as on their own. Anybody who has been part of any team will be able to relate to at least one model or theory and by using this guide and report, a person should be able to clearly identify different types of team and understand what skills and traits are required of a good team leader or manager.

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Reference/Source:

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_74.htm – XY Theory

http://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles/ – A Team Role is defined as “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.”

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_86.htm – Tuckman

http://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-management/management/leadership-and-management/how-teams-work/ – Types of Team

http://www.businessballs.com/tuckmanformingstormingnormingperforming.htm

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/5-different-types-leadership-styles-17584.html

http://developingpotential.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Situational-Leadership.pdf

http://www.leadership-central.com/situational-leadership-theory.html#axzz4Z2Tp4VvC

http://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles/ – Belbin Team Roles

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_56.htm French and Raven 5 Forms of Power

http://www.businessballs.com/action.htm – John Adair Action Centred Leadership Model

http://www.johnadair.co.uk/

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Appendix A: Theory X

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What is Theory X?

The Hard Approach

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Appendix B: Theory Y

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What is Theory Y?

The Soft Approach

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