Community Post

24 September 2010

Insights from Inside Project Management Journal^®
Understanding the Self and the Group Factors that Drive Project Team Performance

By Joseph Dennis Kelly

Successful project teams evolve from a development process that begins long before any of the individual team members meet. And like any other human relationship, project teams take on the character of individuals who shape the team’s intelligence and enable its progression. The team reciprocates by contributing to each individual member’s ongoing self-development.  

Researchers have long explored the dynamics driving project teams and the factors that can improve a team’s performance. But such findings often lack the perspective to comprehensively understand the dynamics shaping a team’s emotional intelligence.

Now, as organizations work to recover from the recent downturn by outmaneuvering competitors and expanding into new markets, business leaders must understand how they can build teams capable of making mature decisions and functioning as singular units.

In a paper published in the September 2010 issue of Project Management Journal, researchers Susan L. Adams and Vittal Anantatmula look at how an individual project team member’s social and behavioral maturity influences team’s performance and intelligence. They found that a project team’s development and maturation is influenced by each individual team member’s personal and social development and maturation.

This study’s proposed five-stage model considers how an individual’s self-identifying influences the individual’s ability to contribute to a project team. More important, the researchers consider how each individual’s participation contributes to both the individual’s and the team’s maturation across five progressive stages: self-identity, social identity, group emotion, group mood and emotional intelligence.

“The stages are shaped by the self-identity characteristics that the team members bring to the team. These characteristics have been developed within the family unit and through life experiences and make each team member unique. When team members interact with other individuals in a team setting, they project these characteristics in both verbal and nonverbal mannerisms and communications to shape the structure and behavioral personality of the team. The team then contributes to the individual’s development of social identity. Studies show that an individual can consciously exhibit social behaviors, verbally or nonverbally, that influence acceptance, leadership, and team-status hierarchies.” (p. 93 – 94)

The proposed five-stage model is innovative because previous studies have only focused on how project managers can build teams through methods for influencing team performance. By failing to consider the individual as the team’s building block, these previous models ignored two important concerns:

1. How an individual’s state of being affects a project team’s emotional state of being
2. How a project team can contribute to an individual’s self-development

By not integrating these concerns into the larger model, many previous studies do not provide insight into how “an individual who lacks positive social and behavioral skills can destroy team unity and cohesion, resulting in team process failure” (p. 94). But as Ms. Adams and Mr. Anantatmula assert, their model can help project managers define and understand how “each phase of the individual’s social and behavioral development presents a challenge to the project manager” (p. 94–95).

To help project managers understand how they can use the five-stage model to build and manage a project team, the researchers relate their model to two others: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the team development and life cycle management model composed of the stages defined as forming, storming, norming and performing. 

Through this approach, they suggest methods for using this model to resolve the behavioral problems that are common to project teams and identify the barriers that often prevent project teams from maturing.

This study suggests that project managers “assess each team member to determine his…maturity level in social and behavioral skills” (p. 95). And that they then apply “basic sociology and behavioral psychology principles to assess the implications of project management team processes” (p. 97). As project managers continue to help teams communicate, they must also fully understand the difference between guiding project teams and acting in role of assessor and evaluator.

The work of Ms. Adams and Mr. Anantatmula provides project managers with a model for shifting their focus from the traditional approach of influencing others—for the purpose of convincing them to perform roles and achieve goals not their own—to one focused on helping individuals contribute to teams in ways that enable teams to mature. It is an approach that can also help each team member mature their own level of emotional intelligence.

Project Management Journal is a peer-reviewed journal “dedicated to advancing the understanding of project, program, and portfolio management through empirical investigation and theoretical research.”