LDR 726 Week 1 Teams and Team Effectiveness Example

Seventy Crews, Two Thousand Turbines: Team Effectiveness Frameworks Applied to a Wind Service Company in the Southern Plains

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

LDR/726: The Dynamics of Group and Team Leadership

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Prairie Gale Wind Services, its crews and its data are composites written for a model paper.

Prairie Gale Wind Services is a composite company based in Amarillo, Texas, that maintains about 2,100 wind turbines for wind farm owners across Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. It employs about 340 field technicians organized into 70 crews of two to five people, plus regional supervisors, a remote monitoring center and support staff. Crews climb turbines more than 260 feet tall to perform scheduled maintenance, replace components and troubleshoot faults, often working far from supervisors in remote areas. The company's contracts reward turbine availability, the share of time turbines can produce power. Renee Castillo, vice president of field operations and a doctoral student, has noticed large differences among crews. Last year, the top third of crews had repeat-repair rates below 4 percent and no recordable injuries, while the bottom third had repeat-repair rates above 12 percent and five of the company's seven recordable injuries. All crews use the same tools, procedures and training. This paper applies team effectiveness research to understand the differences.

Groups and Teams

A team is a set of people who interact interdependently toward shared goals, with distinct roles and shared accountability. Prairie Gale's crews are teams in this sense: technicians depend on one another for safety at height, for diagnosing faults and for completing work within weather windows.

A Review of Team Effectiveness

Kozlowski and Ilgen (2006) reviewed research on work group and team effectiveness. They grouped what is known into three clusters: what members do together, such as coordinating and talking; the shared conditions that grow out of working together, such as belonging, collective confidence and common understanding of the job; and the levers organizations can pull, such as how teams are built, trained and led. They emphasized that team effectiveness depends on how cognitive, motivational and behavioral processes unfold over time and that leaders shape these processes.

From IPO to IMOI

Ilgen et al. (2005) reviewed team research and argued for moving beyond input-process-output models to input-mediator-output-input models. Mediators include both processes and emergent states, such as trust and team learning, and outcomes become inputs for later cycles. A team that succeeds builds confidence that shapes its next task; a team that fails may lose trust and perform worse.

A Functional Approach to Team Leadership

Morgeson et al. (2010) proposed a functional approach to team leadership, defining leadership as satisfying critical team needs. They split the work of leading a team into two rhythms: preparing between tasks, which covers choosing members, clarifying purpose, setting expectations and planning, and supporting during tasks, which covers watching progress, dealing with outsiders, pushing the team, pitching in, fixing problems, securing resources and keeping relations healthy. These functions can be performed by formal leaders internal or external to the team or by members.

The Data

The diagnosis used repeat-repair and injury records for all crews over a year, a short survey of 290 technicians on team processes and emergent states and interviews with technicians from six crews, three high-performing and three low-performing.

Inputs

Inputs were similar across crews: tools, training and procedures. Experience varied, but high-performing crews were not more experienced on average. Crew stability differed: high-performing crews had kept the same members for over a year, while low-performing crews changed members frequently as technicians were moved to cover shortages.

Processes

High-performing crews held a pre-climb briefing before every job, reviewing the task, hazards and roles, and a short debrief afterward. Low-performing crews often skipped briefings when behind schedule. Communication during work was clearer in high-performing crews, with closed-loop confirmations on the radio.

The best crews spend ten minutes at the base of the tower agreeing on the job before anyone clips in.

Emergent States

Survey results showed the largest differences in shared mental models, the degree to which members agreed on how tasks should be done and who does what, and in trust. High-performing crews also reported higher collective efficacy, confidence that the crew could handle difficult jobs. In IMOI terms, their past successes fed confidence, while low-performing crews' callbacks eroded trust.

Leadership Functions

In high-performing crews, the lead technician performed transition functions, such as planning and setting expectations, and members shared action functions, such as monitoring one another's harnesses. In low-performing crews, lead technicians focused on doing tasks themselves, and planning and monitoring were inconsistent. Regional supervisors rarely performed boundary management, such as negotiating realistic schedules with the monitoring center.

What Technicians Said

Interviews added texture to the numbers. A technician on a high-performing crew described the briefing as the moment the crew agreed on what could go wrong. A technician on a low-performing crew said briefings were skipped whenever the monitoring center called with another fault, and that he often learned what his partner planned only at the top of the tower. Several technicians on low-performing crews said they did not fully trust a teammate they had worked with for only a few weeks, especially for rescue procedures. These accounts match the survey finding that shared understanding and trust separate the crews.

The Role of the Monitoring Center

The remote monitoring center assigns work and pushes crews to restore turbines quickly. Its dispatchers rarely know which crews are new or which tasks are unusually complex. Pressure from the center is felt most by crews already struggling, since they fall behind more often. Boundary management, one of the action functions Morgeson et al. (2010) describe, would mean a supervisor or lead technician negotiating realistic expectations with the center.

The Cycle of Decline

The IMOI view explains how low-performing crews become trapped. Frequent member changes weaken shared mental models, rushed jobs skip briefings, callbacks follow and members lose trust and confidence, which leads to more rushed work. Breaking the cycle requires changes to inputs, such as crew stability, and to processes, such as protected briefing time.

Practical Implications

The diagnosis suggests early steps: protect briefing and debriefing time on every job, keep crews together where possible and train lead technicians in planning and monitoring functions. Later weeks will develop these ideas in detail.

Questions for the Course

The diagnosis raises questions the course will address: how crews develop over time, how they communicate and decide, how they manage conflict, how team building and coaching can help, whether crews can manage themselves with less supervision and how 70 crews coordinate as a larger system.

Limits of the Diagnosis

The data are correlational, and other factors, such as the age of turbines in each region, may affect results. Comparing crews within the same region helps but does not remove all differences.

Conclusion

Team effectiveness research directs attention to processes, emergent states and leadership functions, and newer models emphasize cycles in which outcomes shape later performance. At Prairie Gale, crews with similar inputs differ in briefing routines, shared mental models, trust and how leadership functions are performed, and low-performing crews fall into a cycle of instability and lost confidence. These findings frame the questions for the rest of the course.

References

Ilgen, D. R., Hollenbeck, J. R., Johnson, M., & Jundt, D. (2005). Teams in organizations: From input-process-output models to IMOI models. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 517-543. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070250

Kozlowski, S. W. J., & Ilgen, D. R. (2006). Enhancing the effectiveness of work groups and teams. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 7(3), 77-124. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2006.00030.x

Morgeson, F. P., DeRue, D. S., & Karam, E. P. (2010). Leadership in teams: A functional approach to understanding leadership structures and processes. Journal of Management, 36(1), 5-39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206309347376