8
Team Quality Management
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. (Dante)
Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed the passage with you? (Walt Whitman)
Key Learning Points
- Conformity processes in teams and the dangers of ‘Groupthink’
- Team defence mechanisms and how to overcome them
- The value of constructive controversy
- Techniques for encouraging team task focus
- Minority views and dissent in teams
Teams exist to get a job done or achieve a set of objectives. Their principle commitment should therefore be to doing that. In well-functioning teams, inevitably, that means team members will have constructive debates about how best to do the task. Ensuring the team has a task focus and is concerned with ensuring high quality in their processes and outputs is the subject of this chapter.
So far, we have considered the importance of a clear vision or set of objectives along with high levels of participation in a team. These two elements are necessary but insufficient to guarantee effective team working. There is evidence that these very factors in isolation can be the seeds of disastrous outcomes. Consider the following account as an illustration of how clear objectives and high levels of participation and cohesion may lead to quite the opposite in the ...
