TEAM DEVELOPMENT

A TRAINING APPROACH

Organizations exist in the minds of people. Rules, procedures, policies, and norms may be codified in written form as bylaws, articles of incorporation, etc., but it is the way in which these rules are expressed in the behavior of employees who interact daily that sets the character and climate of any organization. In this sense, one may speak of the culture of an organization: habits, expectations, and attitudes that define its daily activities. Implied in this perspective is the corollary that as people change their habits and attitudes, so do organizations.
Organizational self-renewal is simply one way to conceptualize the concrete behavioral, attitudinal, and perceptual changes that may occur among the people who comprise a human social system. One currently popular means of introducing organizational change and renewal is “team building”; that is, the introduction of a systematic, long-range plan for the improvement of interpersonal relationships among those workers who are functionally interdependent. Team building implies the ultimate purpose of increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of a group in its pursuit of personal and organizational objectives.
Contemporary social trends in business, industry, and organizational life appear to be moving toward the humanization of bureaucratic structures. Increasingly, the more highly educated, younger entrants into the labor market today expect a voice in those decisions that affect them; seek more candor in their communications with others; and prefer to build cooperative, rather than competitive, relations with others. The implementation of democratic principles in organizational settings is fairly new, and attempts are imperfect and tentative. However, in those settings where efforts have been maintained in this direction, long-term effects are almost inevitably beneficial, not only for the individual but also for the organization.
Taking seriously the concept of organizational democracy will require some profound changes, both structurally and functionally, within many contemporary organizations. The need to decentralize power, to share and delegate power, and to trust a large portion of future success explicitly to one’s subordinates are some of the functional changes that can be anticipated with the further application of methods of organizational change such as team building.
Traditional hierarchical organizations are faced with the necessity of inventing new and more realistic structures to provide the channels for shared planning and decision making. Japanese management introduced some innovative concepts along these lines in their Sony plant near San Diego, California. As detailed by Johnson and Ouchi (1974), a “bottom-up” approach leads to effectively functioning teams of decision makers throughout all levels of the organization:

While the Japanese meticulously define the status of the leader, his role in the decision-making process is little differentiated from that of others in the organization. Rather, he sees his task as improving on the initiatives of others and creating an atmosphere in which subordinates are motivated to seek better solutions. So the responsibility of the corporation’s success rests not just with him but with all employees. (p. 62)

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The increasingly important role ascribed by business and industry to the psychological determinants of productivity traces its inception to the early research in “scientific management” shortly after the turn of the century and specifically to the now classic “Hawthorne” studies conducted in the late 1920s and early 1930s at a Western Electric plant in Illinois (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).
In the early 1930s, conditions were right in the United States for the emergence of group dynamics as an academic discipline in the field of applied behavioral science (Cartwright & Zander, 1968). In education, mental health, administration, and social work, the emphasis was clearly beginning to focus on those techniques that would lead to greater group effectiveness, personal growth, and attainment of organizational goals. The crisis and aftermath of World War II provided an additional impetus. The research questions asked by both experimental social psychologists and entrepreneurs in business and industry were “How can conditions be arranged so that individuals may simultaneously satisfy their personal needs and the needs of the organization?” “How can industrial democracy be implemented without the loss of productivity and/or ‘control’ that most managers fear would follow?” “What are the most effective procedures for group management, and how can these be taught?”
Beginning with the monumental contributions of Kurt Lewin and his colleagues in the 1940s, the field of applied behavioral science has grown with unprecedented rapidity. Today there is a plethora of findings, techniques, and training programs designed to disseminate and promote the utilization of this accumulated scientific knowledge.
The need for the efficient utilization of human resources in our technological society has perhaps never been greater than it is today. Increasing sophistication in technology requires equally sophisticated human capabilities. As current economic trends close the margin between cost and profit, management is ready to adopt new approaches that promise greater efficiency. Applied group dynamics is still relatively untapped as a point of intervention into organizational systems, especially when compared to such already rationalized and precision-engineered areas as equipment, building, cash flow, etc.

TEAM BUILDING

The total approach to organizational self-renewal that incorporates team building is called organization development (OD). As defined by John Sherwood (1972), OD is

(a) A long-range effort to introduce planned change based on a diagnosis which is shared by the members of an organization.

(b) A . . . program [that] involves an entire organization, or a coherent “system” or part thereof.

(c) [A program whose] goal is to increase organizational effectiveness and enhance organizational choice and self-renewal.

(d) [A program whose] major strategy . . . is to intervene in the ongoing activities of the organization to facilitate learning and to make choices about alternative ways to proceed. (p. 153)

Values

The effort to build teams of workers in organizational settings is based on the following set of implicit values or assumptions about human nature and organizational life. These premises underlie all strategies employed in a team-building effort.

^? The values of a democratic society, in which participation, involvement, and responsibility are prized as desirable behaviors; these behaviors are valuable not only to the individual in his or her pursuit of individual self-fulfillment and growth, but they are valuable to society in that they perpetuate and preserve the ideology of freedom on which this nation was founded;

^? Freedom of choice among a broadened range of alternatives and responsible accountability for the choice to which one is committed;

^? A spirit of scientific inquiry, which stresses the need to examine human interaction in order to better guide human interaction into constructive patterns;

^? The belief that a healthy organization is like a healthy individual, in that members of the organization are aware of their own actions and the reasons for them; and

^? The assumption that interpersonal competence cannot be enhanced unless individuals receive frank and accurate information regarding the impact of their behavior on others; such knowledge provides the power to make those changes necessary to increase effectiveness in organizational behavior.

The Feedback Process

The basic objective involved in team building is to establish regular feedback mechanisms for each group of individuals who must work together to achieve organizational goals. “Feedback” is a term borrowed from engineering to refer to corrective information that is “fed back” from a given situation to a controlling mechanism in order to maintain an optimal state in that situation. A heater thermostat is a familiar example of a feedback mechanism. In the applied behavioral sciences, the concept is used to refer to information that members of a group receive from others regarding their impact on those others. To be helpful, feedback should be specific, descriptive, focused on things that can be changed, and phrased in such a way as to enhance the probability that it will be responded to constructively. Members of a group can be taught to give one another feedback in helpful ways. A conceptual model, such as the Johari Window (Luft, 1969) is often useful as a teaching tool in this regard.
A fundamental part of any team-building program is the task-oriented feedback session, in which team members gather together, without the pressure of outside commitments or tight time constraints, to accomplish a number of aims related to group effectiveness. Among these:

^? To share information that can be used as the basis of corrective action to improve personal and organizational functioning;

^? To create an atmosphere of inquiry within which the participants can learn about the relationship between their own behavior and the achievement of organizational objectives;

^? To discover how one’s own behavior aids or hinders the task accomplishment of others; and

^? To clarify goals and objectives being sought by the participants in their organizational behavior.

Generally, task-oriented feedback sessions involve all those who are functionally interdependent as an operating team in an organizational setting. Such groups may range in size from five to twenty. The ground rules for such sessions are relatively simple and straightforward. The following are taken from the original version of a tape-assisted learning program on team building that has been revised and is currently available in commercial form (Solomon & Berzon, 1976).

1. Talk about what’s happening in the group.
This means, talk about what’s going on right now in this group—the behavior and feelings of the members of the group. What is happening in the group will be interesting to everyone. What has happened outside the group may interest only one or two of the group members.

2. Learn to trust your own feelings.
Your feelings are your best guide to what is really happening in the group. Often persons are reluctant to share their true feelings, out of fear of ridicule or the anticipated need to explain or justify a particular feeling. However, no explanation or justification is needed. Your feelings are factual events which are part of the group’s process and so should be shared with the rest of the group.

3. Be as honest as you can when you talk about yourself.
The success of this group depends on the degree to which each of you is willing to talk about his/her feelings, to question each other when you hear something you think is false, to care about each other and even to take the chance of being hurt by others in order to learn something valuable about yourself.

4. Pay attention when others are talking.
You cannot talk and listen at the same time—even if, at that moment, you are only talking to yourself.

5. Try to understand what others are feeling when they talk about themselves.
Put yourself in their place; see if you have had an experience which might match, in some way, what others are talking about. Don’t listen only for the words others use when speaking; listen for the feelings behind the words, and respond to those. Often, the words a person uses will not match the feeling he is communicating (e.g., the individual who says, through clenched teeth, “I’m not angry!”) The feelings underlying what the person is saying are often better indicators of what is really going on than his words alone. (Tape 1, Side A, Session 1)

Frequently, a team-building session will begin with a request by the facilitator that each member take a moment to prepare to do one of two things: either to give feedback to someone in the group or to solicit feedback from the group. Sometimes the facilitator may suggest that the group members briefly prepare a list of “resentments and appreciations” they feel for one another and use that list as the basis for giving and asking for feedback.
The ground rules of giving and receiving feedback explicitly encourage risk taking in interpersonal communication. Prospective members of team-building programs may worry about the possibility of individuals being “hurt” by such exchanges. However, careful empirical research does not substantiate the rumored “horror stories” of individuals being severely harmed in such sessions (Batchelder & Hardy, 1968). Whether or not feedback sessions can be “harmful” depends on one’s definition of that term. Properly conducted feedback sessions are no more stressful than many other forms of human interaction and not as stressful as such commonly accepted social institutions as marriage and graduate school!
For many individuals, psychological growth and maturity are painful processes. They may require relinquishing idealized and exaggerated beliefs about oneself and others. Yet most individuals report that the pain of growth is preferable to the stagnation of self-deception. It is commonly reported by participants in growth groups that, in the pursuit of self-knowledge, one simultaneously experiences the need to know and the fear of knowing. But the reward of the former is ultimately worth the cost of the latter.
Feedback, when properly given (not as an accusation, but as a statement of how behavior affects others’ feelings), can be extremely helpful to the recipient. Such information can help an individual become more effective in his or her interpersonal relations, on-the-job behavior, and task accomplishment. If a person’s behavior is not having the intended or desired effect, he or she can change it. Without feedback, the impact of his or her behavior on others may never be fully or accurately known. If a person’s behavior is having desirable or intended effects, then feedback can help strengthen and expand such behavior. Feedback “closes the loop” in a communication cycle, allowing an individual accurately to assess the consequences of his or her own behavior.

Fear of Reprisal

When team-building efforts bring into interaction individuals from different levels of the organizational hierarchy, there is often present in the lower-status persons a fear that their candid communications will be “used against them” in some way; that “it’s not safe to tell the truth when your boss is present—especially if it is something you know he or she doesn’t want to hear.” For example, if the person who is to conduct performance appraisals and salary reviews on others in the group receives negative feedback from a subordinate on the team, might he or she not (unconsciously?) retaliate by lowering the rating of that person’s job performance or by withholding an endorsement for a salary increase?
The threat of reprisal may never be removed permanently from task-oriented feedback sessions. However, it can be dealt with directly when it arises and treated as a realistic issue to resolve, if the group is willing to do so. Also, setting guidelines for the group at the very beginning (including, sometimes, the norm of confidentiality) and holding all group members accountable for the enforcement of these guidelines may help reduce this problem. A supervisor or manager who violates a pledge to the group will lose the social control he or she has by virtue of his or her position; although the manager may retain “role power,” he or she will be confronted with a situation in which those on whom he or she depends for success may be functioning in ways to undermine his or her accomplishments. Such a strategy is self-defeating, and honest discussion in the group should aid in establishing norms against retaliation or reprisal by higher-status individuals.

Team-Building Techniques

Experiential learning activities are utilized in many team-building programs to develop the awareness of group process necessary for effective teamwork. The handbooks developed by Pfeiffer & Company (Pfeiffer & Jones, 1973-1977, 1974) provide extremely helpful resource material for this purpose. Training sessions give members of operating teams a means to focus on their own functioning. Instruction is directed toward those important dimensions of group effectiveness that allow group members to analyze their own performance.
A frequently used technique for this purpose is to arrange two teams in a group-on-group configuration, with one team in the center circle performing a task and the other team in an outer circle observing the processes of the inner group. Following a brief period of interaction, the observing team rates the observed behaviors on a series of process dimensions, such as “communication patterns,” “decision making,” “task behaviors,” “maintenance behaviors,” and “self-oriented behaviors,” while the inner-group members may individually rate their degree of satisfaction with such aspects of group functioning as “how we managed our time,” “the degree to which I felt listened to,” and “the amount of trust and openness in the group.” The observer ratings are then fed back to the inner group for discussion, and an attempt is made to integrate the observer ratings with the subjective ratings of the group members themselves.
Particularly helpful in the beginning stages of a group are instruments (rating sheets, observer checklists, etc.), since most uninstructed individuals find that focusing on the process level of group interaction seems “unnatural” or even “impolite.” The facilitator’s role at this point is clearly to legitimate a change in group norms from looking away politely from what is really happening among people in a group to dealing honestly with the reality of human interaction in the group. Although concerned with such factors as tact and timing, the facilitator is responsible for seeing that these are not used to avoid issues that should be confronted.
As the group matures in its skills of process observation and feedback, the need for written instrumentation diminishes. Instead of a “post meeting reaction sheet,” a team may eventually use a verbal critique session (five or ten minutes) at the end of each group session to accomplish the same objectives.
The major function of any instrument employed in the team-building effort is to legitimate the exercise of process awareness in operating teams and to perpetuate a continual evaluation of the group’s functioning by the group members themselves. Any “games,” simulations, small-group activities, or structured experiences should be employed solely for these purposes. It is important that the consultant be skillful enough in social interaction and knowledgeable enough about group dynamics to help the group integrate its experience in the training sessions into a comprehensive viewpoint about organizational behavior. One function of leadership in a team-building program is to provide “meaning attribution,” i.e., to help the group conceptualize its experiences and fit them into a meaningful frame of reference, so that the techniques of experiential learning do not become mere “fun” games with little or no carry-over to daily living and on-the-job situations.
Although the problem of transferring training may be approached in a variety of ways, the consultant will be aided in this effort by (1) directing group members’ attention explicitly to applying the learnings derived from such experiences to on-the-job situations; (2) using experiential activities that have high “transferability,” in that they clearly mirror specific job-related concerns; and (3) encouraging the invention of simulations and learning activities by the participants themselves.

DESIGNING TEAM-BUILDING PROGRAMS

A team-building program must be designed to provide optimal learning for the participants. This means a design that (1) is internally consistent; (2) is sequential, with each segment building meaningfully on the preceding segment; (3) takes into consideration the stage of development and maturity of the team being trained; (4) has built-in checkpoints to assess the degree to which all members of the team are “together” in their learning, understanding, and “internalization” of the materials being covered; and (5) develops sufficient cohesiveness among the team members early in the program to sustain the confrontation that generally emerges in later stages.
Designing team-building programs is usually a process of adapting existing techniques to specific situational constraints and demands. Although there are commercially available programs that may be used with any operating team in an organizational setting (e.g., Solomon & Berzon, 1976), most often the program is tailored to the specific needs of the team being trained. Elements common to all team-building programs, however, may be heightened process awareness, increased trust and openness among group members, and improved fidelity of communication. Beyond these most basic considerations, a team-building program should incorporate whatever is most meaningful to that team.
Once the basic group-dynamics considerations have been covered, there are usually one or two concerns or problems specific to the group’s particular situation. These, of course, inevitably lead to other issues that carry the team-building experience further.

THE CONSULTANT

Role

In most organizational settings, the role of the consultant or facilitator diminishes over the life span of the operating team. However, a consultant is essential in the early stages of a group.
The facilitator ensures that the ground rules and guidelines for the proper conduct of feedback sessions are established as group norms. Because people who work together tend to build up, over time, a set of “implicit contracts” by which they tacitly agree to avoid dealing with many of the real issues that face them, an outside consultant helps the group confront these contracts, in order to open them to examination and legitimate change.
Such efforts are essential to the effective functioning of work groups; feedback in such situations is perhaps even more important than it is in groups of strangers. Once the norm of inquiry is established and the ground rules for feedback are accepted by the group, work teams can continue to monitor their own functioning, be aware of their own process, and continually evaluate and modify their own function, without the presence of a consultant. A mature work group is one in which each member personally assumes responsibility for the success of the group and feels that whatever happens in the group is as much his or her responsibility as that of any other member.

Characteristics

The characteristics of the consultant are nevertheless crucial in determining the initial success of a team-building effort. Basically, an effective consultant for task-oriented feedback sessions in an organizational setting needs to be a well-integrated person and a skillful communicator (see Pfeiffer & Jones, 1974, pp. 153-154, and Reilly & Jones, 1974, for further discussions).
As a person, the consultant must be able to feel empathy for others, to see things from other people’s perspectives, and to be accepting of others’ values and goals—what Rogers calls Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR).The consultant should be congruent and flexible, aware of himself or herself and of what he or she is feeling, not dogmatic, rigid, or authoritarian. The personal dimension is the most critical characteristic for a successful consultant. He or she must be aware, sensitive, open, and understanding of others and of himself or herself.
Important as this dimension is, however, a consultant must also process certain basic communication skills: the ability “to listen, to express himself or herself (both verbally and nonverbally), to observe, to respond to people, to intervene artfully in the group process, and to design effective learning environments that make efficient use of resources” (Pfeiffer & Jones, 1974, p. 154).

EXAMPLES OF TEAM-BUILDING PROGRAMS

To make more concrete the application of group training techniques to team-building programs, two examples of such programs are outlined and discussed here.

The Tutorial Community Project (TCP)

As one of the consultants to a Ford Foundation program in the Los Angeles City Schools, I participated in developing and implementing in one school an ambitious program that was designed to accomplish several organizational objectives. Among these were the introduction of shared planning and decision making as the vehicle for school governance and policy formulation; the institution of regular task oriented feedback sessions for faculty and administration on a weekly basis; the introduction of feedback sessions into the classroom for students and teachers together; the modification of the teaching process to rely heavily on tutoring among the students themselves (i.e., intraclass and interclass tutoring); and, through a variety of small-group and community activities, the enhancement of parent participation in school activities. The basic thrust of the TCP project was to build in one elementary school a learning community in which all interpersonal transactions could be characterized as helping relationships.
The team-building effort among the teachers and principal is most significant for this discussion. It was apparent that strong feelings were present among faculty members regarding one another and, specifically, the principal. Most of these feelings centered around alleged racist attitudes, but many found their roots in the generally poor quality of the relationships that existed among the staff at the school. Suspicion, distrust, gossip, backbiting, and hostile competitiveness were the most characteristic attributes of the interpersonal relations in that school.
Half the faculty was black; the principal was white; the student body was almost exclusively black. Initial team building took the form of four weekly “rap” sessions, held after school in one teacher’s home. The “rap” sessions were structured to allow those who so desired to express their feelings about what was perceived as racism at the school. However, if anyone was specifically indicted for racist attitudes, that person could not respond directly to the indictment during that session. The purpose of this structure was to “bleed off” the highly volatile emotions surrounding racism. After four such sessions, the group was ready to deal more directly with the interpersonal aspects of the problem; with professional guidance, the group (ten teachers and the principal) began the process of candidly exploring the manner in which their relationships had been aiding or hindering the achievement of the educational objectives of their school.
At the start of the program, only half of the teaching staff and the principal were involved in the feedback groups; the other half of the faculty was not ready or willing, at that time, to participate in an approach to organizational renewal that some of them perceived as personally threatening. As consultants, we decided to concentrate our efforts in those areas where there was willingness to proceed; later, with demonstrated success, we hoped that the reluctant faculty members would join in.
In addition to the weekly task-oriented feedback sessions, a new instrumentality, called the TCP Committee, was created. This was a broadly representative group of teachers, parents, administrators, and support staff whose job it would be to formulate policy for the school on a participatory, democratic basis. The difficulties encountered by this group in changing the governing structure from an autocratic one to a democratic one were dealt with repeatedly in the weekly feedback sessions. These sessions provided a therapeutic outlet for the frustrations, angers, and resentments, as well as the appreciations and pleasures, that the broader OD effort generated.
As the project continued into its second year, it became apparent that there was a danger of polarizing the faculty into two competing groups: those who participated in the TCP events and those who did not. After an abortive attempt to provide alternative feedback for those teachers who did not want to participate in the task-oriented feedback sessions, it became clear that those teachers were obviously employed in the wrong school. With the concurrence of the district, a small number of teachers were transferred from the school at the end of the second year, and an effort was made to recruit replacements whose philosophical orientation was more consistent with the goals of TCP.
The desired replacement process was partially accomplished through the establishment of a Personnel Committee, composed of teachers, parents, students, and the principal. This committee interviewed all prospective new teachers and jointly decided on replacements. On one occasion, exercising the intuitive wisdom of youth, the sixth-grade black student serving on the committee looked an applicant squarely in the eye and asked, “Do you really want to work with kids like us, or are you just in it for the money?”
TCP was an ambitious undertaking, an OD project in the best sense of that term. Simultaneous efforts were mounted to change, systematically and over a long-term period, a number of dysfunctional norms in the educative process practiced at that school. After three years, several training workshops, numerous feedback sessions and committee meetings, and many consulting hours, the school was clearly functioning differently than it had been three years earlier. Whether or not the trends initiated through team building will be sustained is, of course, difficult to know.
The team-building effort was central to the changes anticipated in a TCP school. Task-oriented feedback was the primary vehicle to accomplish effective team building. Prior to beginning feedback, all prospective participants received training in two all-day sessions. In these sessions, they learned to study their own process through the use of group decision-making activities. Such activities, which allow for the comparison of individual and group outcomes, may be used to demonstrate the synergistic effect of group problem solving and to provide a vehicle to analyze team effectiveness. The NASA¹¹ Developed by Jay Hall, Teleometrics International, 1755 Woodstead Court, The Woodlands, Texas 77380. activity was used for this purpose. Additionally, participants were introduced to the FIRO theory of group development (Schutz, 1958). Experiential activities were provided relating to each of the theory’s three group-development phases.
The specific design of the team-building program in the TCP project emerged as the consultants worked closely with the participants over the three-year life of the undertaking. As the need arose, additional training workshops were offered, with formal cognitive input sessions, as well as experiential, structured activities. However, the main core of the team-building effort was the weekly, one and one-half hour, task-oriented feedback sessions.
Dr. Jerry Newmark, director of the TCP project, evaluated its success this way:

It takes time for these sessions to work well. For some people, they are still threatening or irrelevant, but for those who have participated, they have been very valuable. School surveys have indicated that problem-solving and most person-to-person relationships have improved. When the staff and parents evaluated feedback, one teacher said, “I used to try things and fall flat on my face, and then I’d go back to my old way of doing things. But now I know I’ll try something, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll discuss it with some friends, get some feedback, modify it and try it again.”

“We’ve never shared before,” another teacher added. “Not even a pencil. We wanted to be best. Not only didn’t we share the best things, we definitely didn’t share the worst things we did. So now everybody is open about their ideas, about what they are doing, and it makes everybody happier.”

A parent said, “I do see many of the teachers relaxing, beginning to feel a little more loose about things. When a problem comes up, they really go and try to talk it out and resolve it right away, rather than let it get blown many times out of proportion.”

A visiting principal from a non-TCP school said, “For the first time I have seen teachers talking to each other in an open honest way.” (undated, p. 8)

Recently, I have undertaken a continuing program of team building for a large Naval installation in San Diego. This facility provides repair, maintenance, and modification services for several types of naval aircraft. It employs approximately seven thousand civilian workers and has a large complement of military personnel on active duty.
The team-building program was conceived as a series of weekly four-hour sessions over a six-week period. Each training class consists of approximately forty participants.
Within each training group, there are five to seven “teams” of functionally interdependent individuals, each team with from six to eight members. The training takes place during working hours and follows a pre-established sequence.
The team-building program incorporates the following events:

Session 1: Setting Objectives. This session provides the participants with an overview of the training experience, answers any specific questions they may raise, and sets forth the program objectives clearly. The two general goals of the program are stated: (a) to enhance individuals’ ability to make fuller use of their work potential through better understanding and a broadened experiencing of themselves in relation to other people on the job; and (b) to improve team cooperation and performance through improved communication.
An exploration of the mutual expectations of trainer and participants is undertaken in an activity dealing with the “psychological contract.” In their team groups, participants explore their own goals for the training program (thus making a public commitment to their teammates regarding personal objectives), and trainer and team members explore mutual contributions to the accomplishment of those goals.

Session 2: Building Cohesiveness. In their team groupings, the participants engage in an activity to rank order the “ten characteristics of a good team member.” This interaction provides the first opportunity for the team to analyze its own effectiveness in accomplishing a task. Brief group sessions are held, in which members are encouraged to talk about the feelings they had while working together on the ranking task. They are specifically instructed to talk about those things that happened in the group that were particularly helpful to task accomplishment or that made task accomplishment particularly difficult. Ground rules for interaction are provided. The session ends with the activity in which each team member tells the group his or her perceived strengths and the team responds in kind.

Session 3: The Helping Relationship. The trainer introduces the concept of force-field analysis. Teams are asked to analyze on-the-job situations in terms of the forces that they perceive to be “driving” for improvement and those that appear to be “blocking” improvement.
The session ends with a brief listening activity,² in which trios of team members sequentially take the part of a talker, a listener, and an observer in order to improve their listening skills. As the talker tells the listener something personal, the observer watches the behavior of the listener and then gives feedback designed to improve listening skills.² See “Listening Triads: Building Communications Skills,” Structured Experience 8, in J.W. Pfeiffer & J.E. Jones (Eds.), A Handbook of Structured Experiences for Human Relations Training (Vol. II). San Diego, CA: Pfeiffer & Company, 1974.

Session 4: Process Awareness. Participants are provided a handout detailing what to observe in a group (Kolb, Rubin, & McIntyre, 1974) and then employ a group-on-group configuration to practice process observation and feedback. Groups of six to eight members are given a task to perform (e.g., “Discuss what could be done to improve teamwork in this organization”). Equal numbers of observers record their observations of the group process on a process-observation form; each observer watches only one person and each picks a different group member to observe. After approximately twenty minutes of interaction, the individual members of the task group join their observer for five to ten minutes of feedback. Then roles are reversed and the process is repeated.
The final portion of this session is devoted to a group decision-making activity designed to illustrate the synergistic effect of group, as compared to individual, decision making. The activity also provides a vehicle for each team to analyze its own effectiveness and for the team members to discuss this openly with one another, using a written evaluation form to guide their discussion.

Session 5: Application to Job Situation. First, teams are introduced to the FIRO theory of group development (Schutz, 1958) and individual FIRO scores are interpreted. Then, the teams individually set about assessing the organizational climate of their on-the-job unit. The assessment is facilitated by a written evaluation form. The summary ratings of the perceived organizational climate for each team are plotted and discussed.
The session ends with each team selecting that aspect of organizational climate about which it would like to do something constructive and applying a formalized sequence of force-field analysis to the development of an action plan. Again, during these activities, the team engages in “instant team building” by shifting its focus from task to process and by spending a few minutes critiquing its own process.

Session 6: Team Work and Cooperation. The final session is devoted to summarizing effective leadership behaviors in group management and to conducting an experiential activity designed to confirm some team-generated hypotheses about the conditions necessary for cooperation. The cooperation activity also ends the training program on a note of optimism.
Reactions from participants in this program have been, in the vast majority, favorable. Positive comments on the evaluation forms range from “Better communications between team members; that is, more and accurate information is communicated” and “We are conducting our meetings in a more positive manner” to “We developed more trust and understanding of each other.” Still, there are occasional comments like “It is hoped that all of us reject the communistic, ‘all-equal’ doctrine preached by Dr. Solomon and others of his ilk.”
At this writing, approximately two hundred people have been through this program. Plans for its ongoing use are continuing to develop. It is expected that, as more and more people have the team-building experience, support for the program norms will spread more widely; support networks of individuals who have been in the program will develop, and the organizational climate will become increasingly facilitative of the openness, candor, caring, and accountability that define the desired qualities of healthy interpersonal relations among team members.

CONCLUSION

Improving the quality of human relationships within structured social systems improves the overall competence of that system. Team building has proven successful in helping reticent personnel become communicative; the reserved and secretive become involved and open; the conflict-oriented become cooperative; the apprehensive become trusting; the impersonal develop mutual concern and shared objectives; the independent or counterdependent become interdependent; and the individualistic develop a gregarious team spirit.
Team building is not a panacea. Judiciously applied, with proper professional guidance at its inception, it does provide one useful and proven technology for the improvement of organizational effectiveness. It enables the creation of conditions in which workers may seek and find greater self-realization and personal growth than is presently available in most organizational settings, while simultaneously contributing to the attainment of organizational objectives.

TEAM DEVELOPMENT