The perfect business team? - Article 1

            The authors Morgenson, Reider, and Campion (2005) founded their research on many of the previous studies that will be shown in this review. They claim that there is very little empirical research on how to select individuals in team-based settings. Their goals was to examine whether three of the most commonly used selection techniques for hiring into traditional settings (a structured interview, a personality test, and a situational judgment test) would be effective for hiring into team settings. The study is called a primary study by the authors and distinctly separated from other work before it, that estimated validity based on meta-analytically derived studies or bivariate relationships. According to the authors it thereby answers calls for primary research by Bobko, Roth & Potosky, (1999).

Instead of providing a traditional literature review, this study examined a total of seven hypotheses. Each is referenced to team settings that the authors selected and then put in context of literature available for each factor. The factors included: social skills, personality characteristics, team knowledge, and incremental prediction.

            To collect the data an initial set of 500 employees in a Midwestern mill were identified. Each of these employees starts the career at a common point and then works through the different jobs within the mill. This provided the standard development path that was the main reason to choose this particular organization. Because the authors and their team didn’t have the resources to interview all 500 employees utilizing the structured interviews they had developed, the managers of the five main departments in the mill were asked to each select 20 employees for the study. In case a selected employee didn’t want to voluntarily participate in the research, an alternate was chosen by the managers. At the time of selection the managers didn’t know what the exact subject of the research was or what kind of questions the employees would be asked. The authors reference the occupational information network skill, ability, and work styles surveys (Peterson at al., 2001) as one of their selection and analysis tools. The total of 28 questions of the interviews were developed using structures identified by Campion, Palmer, and Campion (1997). Fourteen questions referred to situation aspects and 14 to behavioral aspects according to Lathan, Saari, Pursell, &Campion (1980) and Janz (1982). Employees were scheduled to take the interview and tests during work time. Contextual performance measures were collected concurrently from department managers. Each manager was asked a standardized set of questions regarding the performance of the employees. Their responses were included in the analysis together with the results from the employee interviews.

            The results of the interviews and the performance tests were collected and then analyzed in a quantitative analysis looking for correlations. Regression testing was frequently applied.  Interestingly, the results provided in the text mostly show mean, standard deviation and correlation figures. The results of the regression testing were not discussed although it would be expected that they showed significant results.
 

Study conclusions.

This study attempts to address a number of issues related to the selection process of team members. The authors acknowledge that the use of multiple constructs in an attempt to explain more of the applicable data is fairly common in other areas of research, but no previous research had investigated the extent to which the six constructs used for this study predict contextual performance in a team setting. The main result of this study is the fact that social skills, some personality characteristics, and teamwork knowledge have been proven to be related to contextual performance. This suggests that individuals with higher levels of these characteristics will have high contextual performance and that by making selection decisions based on these characteristics an organization should have better performing teams.

The authors point out a few limitations, like the limited number of participants and the fact that the employees were selected by their respective department managers. They also point out that team size and different task demands can change the results that were found. A significant flaw of this study appears to be the fact that the individuals selected to answer the interview questions and conduct the performance tests were already employees of the organization. In addition they all came from the same organization and have completed the exact same learning process. The stated goal of the study was to find the impact of social skills, personality characteristics and teamwork knowledge for the selection of individuals for teams. In this case every participant had already been selected for a team of a very specific type and with very specific task and goals. This flaw makes the transferability of the findings to those situations where organizations need to select individuals as new hires for future team settings questionable.

The other major aspect that can be critiqued regarding this article is the scattering of information around the development of hypotheses. The description of results and conclusions lacks an identifiable flow of ideas, references, or conduct of research. The authors don’t provide a clear result for their readers but proclaim: Implications of the results for selection in team and traditional settings are discussed. It remains interesting to note that a lot of non-empirical work and citations in books and dissertations can be found pointing to this work. As the researchers said in the very beginning of their writing, there is relatively little empirical research on how to select individuals in team based settings. Future research will have to be conducted. It should aim at combining the findings of the past with the reports of the non-empirical work and attempt to find generalizable and transferable results for the selection process of team members so organizations have increased chances to reap optimal results from their innovative and process teams.

The genesis of top management team diversity

The stated purpose of this quantitative research was to study whether or not executive management teams reproduce their own demographic characteristics through selective hiring and firing. There were two main assumptions underlying the expectation of reproductions. The first was the assumption that the executive teams had enough power compared to the boards of directors to choose new team members. The second assumption was that there were no compelling circumstances that rendered it more rational to disrupt the normal reproduction, forcing the team to hire more dissimilar members. Originally the research team of Boone, Olfen, Witteloostuijn, and Brabander (2004) proposed that executive team power strengthens a cycle of “homosocial reproduction” that is only interrupted when teams face such compelling needs for diversity as poor organizational performance, high corporate diversification, and tough market competition. The study is based on seminal research performed by Jeffrey Pfeffer (1983) regarding organizational demographics. After offering some insights into the foundational information that underlies this study, the authors provide extensive references in applicable literature. For that purpose they divided their review into two main theoretical background areas. Those were identified as Forces pulling towards homogeneity, and Forces pulling towards heterogeneity.

The researchers developed and tested a longitudinal model explaining diversity within top executive management teams from the perspective of turnover. The models were used to find answers for seven hypotheses that had been generated. The theoretical perspectives to describe the pull toward team homogeneity and the push towards team heterogeneity were based on Schneider’s (1998) attraction – selection-attrition (ASA) model. This model describes a natural tendency to “hire likes and fire unlikes”, when the teams have the power to do so. The hypotheses were tested in the five biggest Dutch newspaper companies over a period of 25 years, lasting from 1970 till 1994. The researchers reported that many of their expectations were not supported by their findings. They actually found that poor performance and high diversification caused teams to select likes rather then looking for more diversity. Concerning exit from an organization, it was found that poor performance increased the overall likelihood for executives to exit and among those individuals, dissimilar mangers tended to leave first. The study concluded that “homosocial reproduction” occurs, particularly when organizations face conditions that at first glance appear to require growth in executive team diversity. Apparently, top management teams tend to close ranks when environmental complexity and pressure increases.  

Summary . It is encouraging to notice that the authors didn’t conclude that their research was easily transferable to another setting. They actually recommended conducting similar studies using the same approaches and models in other industries, especially those that are known for innovation and creativity. This study and the article describing it were well developed, utilized many references, and spent a lot of time in modeling and analyzing the data. The expected relationship between external pressure and rejuvenation of management teams was not found. To the credit of the research team, this fact wasn’t hidden but openly discussed. It will be interesting to observe how future research in other areas will confirm the findings or determine that the newspaper industry was not the best choice to study the hypotheses that had been developed. Though the results were overwhelmingly negative, this work provides an important part of the mosaic of team selection aspects form the perspective of top management teams and their renewal.

Axel Meierhoefer, President AMC LLC