Table of Contents
Task 1: Good practice guide: Approaches to managing and leading teams
AC 1.1 Evaluate theoretical models used for managing and leading teams
Hackman’s five conditions for team effectiveness. The model proposes that team performance is determined less by what the leader does day to day than by whether five enabling conditions are in place: a real team, meaning bounded membership, interdependent work and reasonable stability; compelling direction, meaning a purpose that is clear, consequential and challenging; enabling structure, meaning well-designed tasks, appropriate size and clear norms of conduct; a supportive organisational context, meaning access to information, resources, rewards and development; and expert coaching available at the right moments.
The model’s principal strength is that it directs attention to design rather than to personality, which is where a manager of four remote teams has most leverage. It is also unusually candid about sequence, holding that coaching applied to a team lacking direction or structure will not compensate for the missing condition. Applied to the department, the evaluation is uncomfortable but useful: the four regional teams satisfy the real team condition, since membership is bounded and stable, but the supportive context condition is only partly met, because the teams sit in different time zones and access to the manager is unequal. The model would predict exactly the pattern now visible, in which errors appear despite competent people, because it locates such failures in conditions rather than in individuals.
Its limitations are real. It is descriptive rather than procedural, telling a manager what must be true without specifying how to make it so. It was developed largely from studies of co-located teams and says little about the coordination costs distance imposes. It also under-weights the interpersonal dynamics that can undermine a team even where every structural condition is satisfied.
The Big Five of teamwork. Synthesised by Salas and colleagues and widely used since, this model identifies five core behavioural components: team leadership, mutual performance monitoring, backup behaviour, adaptability and team orientation. These are held together by three coordinating mechanisms: shared mental models, closed-loop communication and mutual trust.
Its strength is that it specifies observable behaviours rather than states, which makes it directly actionable and assessable. The coordinating mechanisms are particularly valuable in this department. Closed-loop communication, in which the receiver confirms understanding and the sender verifies that confirmation, is a directly transferable safeguard against exactly the sort of handover error a four-time-zone operation generates. Shared mental models explain why teams that have never met one another produce inconsistent outcomes despite following the same procedure: they hold different unstated assumptions about what good looks like. The model also has a stronger empirical foundation than most team frameworks, having been derived from a synthesis of research across high-consequence settings.