Making the Team: A Guide for Managers, Second Edition
- Book Review,
by Leigh L. Thompson
Book Description
A perfect blend of theory and practice, Making the Team unites cutting-edge research on groups with practical management principles. The clear, step-by-step approaches offered in this book will prove especially useful for managers-in-training as well as seasoned executives. The book is organized into 3 primary tasks for the leader/manager: 1) Accurately assessing and improving team performance; 2) Managing the internal dynamics of teams (diversity, conflict, and creativity); and 3) Optimally leveraging the team within the larger organization. For Human Resource employees and trainers, consultants, and all levels of educators.
Book Info
Provides leaders answers to hard questions and provides proven solutions to some of managements greatest challenges; dealing with conflict productively, increasing creativity, managing diversity, and motivating and leading people. Softcover. DLC: Teams in the workplace.
From the Back Cover
About the Book Making the Team is for leaders, managers, and executives—anyone who has to work with people and teams. Making the Team gives leaders answers to hard questions and provides proven solutions to some of management's greatest challenges: Dealing with conflict productively Increasing creativity Managing diversity Evaluating and rewarding team performance Leveraging the team within the organization Managing global teamwork Motivating and leading people The Kellogg Culture The Kellogg School of Management is known throughout the world for its culture of teamwork. Kellogg students are exceptional in their simultaneous ability to lead as well as be team players. Student input is essential to the faculty's teaching methods at Kellogg. The faculty of the Management and Organizations Department at Kellogg brings their world-class research on teamwork into the classroom to create a powerful and interactive group learning experience. The strong Kellogg culture of teamwork inspired the writing of this book, whose key purpose is to expose some of the winning strategies of a teamwork culture.
About the Author
Leigh L. Thompson is the J. Jay Gerber Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She is also the director of the AT&T Behavioral Research Laboratory at Kellogg and the Leading High Impact Teams Executive Program at Kellogg. An active consultant, Thompson has taught teamwork skills to a wide variety of executives and managers all over the world. An internationally recognized scholar, Thompson has published four books and over 65 articles in leading management journals and books. Thompson has received numerous awards and honors for her research, including the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California, and a grant from the Citigroup Behavioral Sciences Research Council of Citibank. For more information about Leigh Thompson's teaching and research, please visit: www.LeighThompson.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When I wrote Making the Team in 2000, my intent was to introduce leaders, managers, and executives to practical research on groups and teams. This enterprise required an integration of theory, research, and application. Five professors—Dave Messick, Keith Murnighan, Mark Rittenberg, Brian Uzzi, and I—offer a three-day course for executives in team leadership at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Moreover, Kellogg offers a full-term course on teamwork to our MBA students. This book is dedicated to the students of Kellogg's executive program and MBA program. The title of the book, Making the Team, has two audiences: leaders and team members. For the leader, the book directs itself toward how teams can be designed to function optimally; for those people who are members of teams, the book focuses on the skills necessary to be a productive team member. Since the publication of the first version, many advances have occurred in team and group research. Every chapter has been updated with new information, new research, updated examples, and more. Specifically, I have made three major changes to the revised version of Making the Team: New, updated research: True to the book's defining characteristic—providing managers with the most up-to-date research in a digestible fashion—I have included the latest research on teamwork and group behavior, thus keeping the book up-to-date and true to its strong research focus and theory-driven approach. The updated research also reports on the survey of executives that we have conducted at Kellogg for the past five years. The survey in the first edition reported the responses of 149 managers and executives; the database of this survey has more than tripled, with a current total of 512 responses. In addition, more than 275 new research studies have been cited. More case studies: I have included more examples and illustrations of effective (as well as ineffective) teamwork. More than 130 new case studies and examples of actual company teams have been added. As before, each chapter opens with an example of a real team. Many of the concepts and techniques in the chapters are supplemented with illustrations and examples from real teams, both contemporary and historical. I do not use these examples to prove a theory; rather, I use them to illustrate how many of the concepts in the book are borne out in real-world situations. Learning and development: Mostly due to my strong research interests in learning, I have put learning front-and-center in the new edition, with a special focus on how leaders should be in a continuous learning mode. For example, in Chapter 1, I have expanded the team-building skills from two in the 2000 edition (accurate diagnosis and theory-based intervention) to three in the current edition (accurate diagnosis, theory-based intervention, and expert learning). In addition to the changes discussed, which affect all chapters and sections of the book, several chapters have undergone updates as new theory and research has broken ground and as our world has been shaped by events such as September 11, 2001, and the rash of corporate fraud. For example, Chapter 6 ("Team Decision Making") now has a new section on decision making and ethics. In addition, all of the chapters have undergone a serious facelift. The revision was sparked not only by advances—as well as calamities—in the corporate world, but also even more so by the great scientific research on teamwork that my colleagues have relentlessly contributed to the field of management science in the past three years, since the first edition went to press. One of the reasons why I love this field is because there are so many wonderful people with whom to collaborate. The following people have had a major impact on my thinking and have brought joy and meaning to the word "collaboration": Cameron Anderson, Linda Babcock, Max Bazerman, Terry Boles, Jeanne Brett, Susan Brodt, John Carroll, Hoon-Seok Choi, Jennifer Crocker, Gary Fine, Craig Fox, Adam Galinsky, Wendi Gardner, Dedre Gentner, Robert Gibbons, Kevin Gibson, James Gillespie, Rich Gonzalez, Deborah Gruenfeld, Reid Hastie, Andy Hoffman, Molly Kern, Peter Kim, Shirli Kopelman, Rod Kramer, Laura Kray, Terri Kurtzburg, John Levine, Allan Lind, George Loewenstein, Jeff Loewenstein, Denise Lewin Loyd, Beta Mannix, Kathleen McGinn, Vicki Medvec, Tanya Menon, Dave Messick, Terry Mitchell, Don Moore, Michael Morris, Keith Murnighan, Janice Nadler, Maggie Neale, Erika Petersen, Kathy Phillips, Robin Pinkley, Mark Rittenberg, Ashleigh Rosette, Ken Savitsky, Elizabeth Seeley, Vanessa Seiden, Marwan Sinaceur, Harris Sondak, Tom Tyler, Leaf Van Boven, Kimberly Wade-Benzoni, Laurie Weingart, and Judith White. The revision of this book would not have been possible without the dedication, organization, and creativity of Rachel Claff, who created the layout, organized the information, edited the hundreds of drafts, mastered the figures, and researched many of the case studies for this book. In this book, I talk quite a bit about the "power of the situation" and how strongly the environment shapes behavior. The Kellogg School of Management is one of the most supportive, dynamic environments that I have ever had the pleasure to be a part of. In particular, Dean Dipak Jain and Associate Deans David Besanko and Robert Magee have created an environment in which teaching and research are happily married and very productive. My colleagues across the Kellogg School are uniquely warm, constructive, and generous. Ken Bardach, former dean of Kellogg's Executive Education, was particularly visionary in his development of programs on teamwork. Directing the KTAG (Kellogg Teams and Groups) Center and the Behavioral Laboratory has been a pleasure beyond compare. I am very grateful for the generous grants I have received through the years from the National Science Foundation's Decision, Risk and Management Program, the Kellogg Teams and Groups Center, and its sister, the Dispute Resolution Research Center. This book is very much a team effort of the people I have mentioned here, whose talents are diverse, broad, and extraordinarily impressive. I am deeply indebted to my colleagues and students, and I feel very grateful that they have touched my life and this book.
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