How important is it that team members see the world consistently?

Drum circles are one of the best examples of shared positive experience

There is a view that the concept of teamwork is suggestive of the need to be “one of the group”. To be like-minded and instep with team members.  This view is reflected in the writings of many team scholars (Eg. Katzenbach and Smith, 1993) who espouse the importance of shared goals. The development of shared goals for a team is a perfectly reasonable expectation to be placed on the team leadership.

Thinking about this in a simple deterministic way, awareness of the larger goals of the host organisation might reasonably be expected to improve the performance outcomes for the team. However, there are complexities with this view that arise from the operating context of the team. First of all, the development of shared goals is an especially challenging task in large and complex organisations. Further, if the team operates in a business environment that is relatively stable and the rate of change is slow, then a team may genuinely have an opportunity to develop shared focus around team goals.

However, what of business environments that are fast-paced and subject to frequent change? The outcomes for the team in these circumstances may be best served by not being focused on specific goals. For example, Larsen (2010) proposes that teams should develop a “shared understanding” of the big picture which is suggestive of a requirement to be personally engaged with much larger matters of organisational vision and strategy in a socially consistent way. An extension of this idea can be seen in the work of Van den Bossche et al., (2011) who propose that social processes underlie the sharing of knowledge in business teams. Of particular interest here is the suggestion of shared mental models and shared cognition, also a consistency of understanding within the team that leads to improved performance.

So, this is where the leaders of teams need to look for opportunities to improve performance in challenging times. At the development of intra-personal and interpersonal constructs such as high beliefs about the capabilities of team members, positive emotional links with others and awareness of the strengths and skills of team members and the alignment of these skills with the challenges coming in from the operating environment.