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of team
communication
BY SARA MCCOMB, ALISON SCHROEDER, DEANNA KENNEDY AND RALITZA VOZDOLSKA
E X E C U T I V E S U M M A RY
Communication dramatically influences a teams overall performance. With the
ever-increasing amount of communication media available, team members easily can become
overwhelmed and engage in inefficient, ineffective communication techniques. Our research provides
insights about who is responsible for team communication, what information must be communicated,
where it is best communicated, when it is most appropriately communicated and why this entire process
must be considered.
10 Industrial Management
Teams get their work done by communicating. Twenty years ago, team members
communicated through meetings,
phone calls and voicemails. Fifteen
years ago, email was added to the list
of communication tools. Ten years
ago, more communication tools were
added, including voice-over-IP (e.g.,
Skype), net-meetings (e.g., Webex),
dashboards and wikis. Over the past
five years, social networking (e.g.,
LinkedIn) has increased, as well as the
use of virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life)
and cloud computing (e.g., Dropbox).
This expansion of technological options
has made communicating easier and
faster, but it also has increased the time
required each day to communicate. In
fact, some days so much time is spent
communicating that team members
have difficulty getting any real work
done.
Communication may lead to other
pitfalls, such as confusion, misdirection
or a lack of coordination. Yet rarely do
people spend time thinking about the
mechanics of communicating. The
human side of team communication
is in desperate need of consideration
to improve the effective and efficient
use of the plethora of communication
tools that are available. For more than
10 years, researchers have been working
to bring this issue to the forefront of
organizational decision makers and
team members. Studies have been
examining how team members communicate from many different angles. The
objective has been to understand how
communication manifests itself on
effective teams. These efforts have led
to some answers about the who, what,
where, when and why of team communication.
Who?
Rarely do
people spend
time thinking
about the
mechanics of
communicating.
Too much
information
communicated
could be
far more
detrimental
than too little
information.
such factors.
Most people consider face-to-face
interactions superior to virtual interactions because they allow for additional
communication cues, such as hand
gestures and intonation, to augment
the words conveyed. As the business
world has gone global and more virtual
communication options are introduced, however, team members often
are geographically dispersed. These
geographically dispersed, or virtual,
teams are presumably at a disadvantage
when compared to teams that can meet
in person because of varying levels of
familiarity among team members.
Indeed, team processes such as
decision making and conflict make
interacting virtually difficult for teams,
and these types of meetings often result
in low levels of member satisfaction
and team performance. The research
suggests that when teams are given the
initial opportunity to have a meaningful
face-to-face encounter, these difficulties
are overcome. Subsequent virtual activities result in performance comparable
to teams that are functioning face-toface throughout their lifecycle.
The key point here is that the first
face-to-face encounter must involve
real, substantive work, not just meetand-greet activities or information
distribution about the project the team
is being assembled to complete. Such
work provides the team members with
an opportunity to learn about their
teammates modes of operations and
personalities, important information
that can be recalled during future virtual
interactions.
Just because teams can meet face-toface does not mean that they should in
every case. The teams tasks have some
influence on where communication
should transpire. Social psychologist
Joseph Edward McGrath describes four
types of tasks that teams may undertake
in his book Groups: Interaction and Performance. Teams can negotiate, execute,
generate and choose. The negotiate and
execute tasks could benefit from faceto-face interaction because nonverbal
cues can enhance the cognitive
By carefully
constructing
communication
exchanges,
teams
can share
information in
a manner that
is effective and
efficient.
september/october 2012 13
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