In our opinion, the model of W. Gibb Dyer Jr, Jeffrey H. Dyer and William G. Dyer is particularly suitable for an initial categorization of many team-relevant factors. This divides a large number of factors into the five overarching topics of Context, Composition, Competencies, Change and Collaborative Leadership.
This helps to gain a fairly complete overview and is also easy to remember (5 C’s). Each of these five topics with the underlying factors is basically a relevant adjusting screw to promote the performance of your team or group. And here comes the clue or the particular difficulty: depending on whether you are dealing with a group or a team, individual factors are relevant in different ways.
So what’s behind the 4Cs?
Hang on, that’s only four!
You saw that correctly. The last C should be considered separately, as it describes a competence to influence the other 4Cs in a positive way. Or as it is called in Management 3.0:
“Simply put, Collaborative Leadership is creating and maintaining a system that includes all people involved in a project, organization, or team”
From the Management 3.0 course
Team performance factors: Context
First, let’s take a closer look at the context, which basically describes the overarching framework conditions, i.e. the organizational environment in which a team works. Of course, there are many organizational factors, but we will only describe a small selection of them here. Perhaps you can think of other factors under context that are particularly relevant for your company or your specific team.
Culture
Corporate culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, behaviors, practices and symbols that make up a company. It is the way in which the people in the company work together and how the company presents itself.
Vision & Mission
The clear definition of vision and mission creates an important common basis for action and decision-making within the team. If all team members share and understand the vision and mission of the company, they can better align their individual tasks and goals.
Roles
The concept of “roles” refers to the specific tasks, responsibilities and authorities that individual employees have within an organization. Each role has specific requirements associated with it and requires certain skills, abilities and behaviors to be performed successfully.
Team performance factors: Composition
Composition relates to the specific composition of the team or group. You need to have the “right people on board” to drive things forward and achieve top performance. Like context, composition is the foundation for building a truly successful and consistently high-performing team.
In order to manage the composition of the team effectively, you (or the person in a leadership role) and the team should take a closer look at the following factors, among others, and reflect on them critically:
Team size
Unfortunately, a magic formula for the perfect team size has not yet been found. Study results here are also rather controversial. Some studies have shown, for example, that smaller groups tend to perform better as they find it easier to communicate effectively and make decisions.
However, there are also other studies that show that larger groups are better able to generate a greater diversity of ideas and perspectives and solve more complex problems. This is where the keyword “cognitive diversity” comes into play.
Skills & abilities
Generally speaking and without taking other factors into account, the more skills and abilities the individual members have, the more successful a team is likely to be. A team of highly talented and trained software developers is more likely to become a real high performance team than a team whose members are more moderately blessed.
Motivation
There are numerous research findings that prove that motivation has a significant influence on the performance of a team. Motivated employees tend to perform better, show more commitment and stay with the company longer.
Team performance factors: Competencies
Successful teams have certain competencies, some of which exist independently of the individual team members and are embedded in the team’s formal and informal processes – in other words, the team’s own, very specific way of working. Let’s take a closer look at some of the underlying factors:
Trust & Psychological Safety
Although these two factors are not conceptually one and the same and we will treat them separately throughout the course, they have very similar effects on team performance and are often treated as one and the same construct in practice. Both Trust and Psychological Safety are an important factor in team collaboration and coordination and, when high, lead to higher satisfaction, motivation and effectiveness, among other things.
Communication, decision-making & conflict management
Some studies have shown that effective communication that offers clear and open opportunities for exchange and solves problems quickly contributes to higher satisfaction and motivation and therefore also to higher performance. Other studies have shown that unclear or faulty communication can lead to conflict and confusion and therefore affect team performance.
Team performance factors: Change
Change describes the team’s ability to adapt and/or change.
High-performance teams must constantly change with the context and its conditions in order to be successful in the long term. A winning formula that works today may not work tomorrow. After all, even last year’s NBA champion is not automatically guaranteed to win the title this year!
Factors related to context, composition, and competencies may need to change to enable the team to achieve new goals successfully over and over again. A team that is capable of continuously reviewing its performance and understanding its strengths and weaknesses can gain insights essential for developing an action plan for continuous improvement.
This “change management” is, in this sense, a kind of meta-competence that draws from the factors of the other areas—context, composition, and competencies—but significantly goes beyond them. You can imagine this in relation to yourself: anyone who has ever seriously tried to make a significant change knows that it is a tremendous effort requiring access to a wide range of internal and external resources.
Factors of Team Performance: Collaborative Leadership
Yay, the final section of this chapter! Let’s keep it short and sweet—final sprint. The concept of Collaborative Leadership is based on the belief that together we can be smarter, more creative, and more competent than any one of us alone, especially when tackling the novel, complex, and multifaceted problems businesses face today.
Collaborative Leadership teams are often seen as far more creative, adaptable, and capable compared to those operating under other leadership styles.
Let’s recall the four C’s we discussed earlier. A leader who succeeds in managing the system rather than the employees prepares their team to tackle the complex, modern challenges of today.
And now?
We’ve taken a closer look at the various factors that influence team performance and how they can be broadly categorized.
The content of this blog is an excerpt from our self-paced course on High-Performance Teams. If you want to learn more about the 4 or 5 C’s, you can find the course here (in German).
But we’ve got a special treat for you: our brand-new Team Dojo! The Team Dojo is a tailored concept designed to improve your team. This concept is based on the 4C model described here. Step by step, we guide you and your team toward continuous improvement.