Kerry's Week 9 Blog - Academic Article

Teamwork in the Technology Age

Richardson, P., & Denton, D. K. (2007). Using the intranet to build teamwork. Team Performance Management, 13(5/6), 184-188.

I thought this article tied into this week's reading because, among other things, it recognizes that many organizations allow employee teams to engage in self-directed work (which Levy showed us can lead to catastrophic results in his article about the Nut Island disaster). It also provides a useful strategy for how to prevent just such an occurrence by using the intranet to foster communication among team members and managers, a tip that could be very useful for the new managers described in Hill's article on managing teams.

It's a fact of life that teams have become an integral and indispensible part of modern organizations. However, many managers (especially new ones) do not yet have a good understanding of how to build a highly effective team. Instead of looking at the team as a whole, many managers still tend to focus on individual performance within a team which can result in more reasons not to cooperate with fellow employees than in motivation to work together. It is crucial to any team's success that there be a clear understanding of the organizational goal or vision towards which they are all working. There is also a fine line between allowing a team to work independently without constant supervision and letting them become so self-directed that they become isolated from management and lose sight of the bigger organizational picture. Richardson and Denton cite the need for a sense of common purpose, being clear about why the team's work is important, availability of relevant information, open communication, and producing significant results as being major success factors for any team. They further state that good team performance will always be difficult to achieve unless there is a system in place for both team members and managers to provide and analyze feedback on team performance.

Intranets provide an ideal solution for real-time feedback, which is essential to team building and management. Anything less than continuous real-time feedback, providing a constant flow of information to the team makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to know that they are meeting expectations and staying focused on the big picture. This is where Richardson and Denton reference Levy's "nut island effect" as an extreme example of what can happen if a team does not have the constant flow of information to and from management. They assert that when used properly, the intranet provides a clearer picture of the true degree of teamwork of a group, rather than "some idealized managerial impression."

Until now, intranets have been used largely for sharing of information that an organization does not want shared with the outside world. Richardson and Denton maintain that it can also be a powerful collaborative tool.