MGMT 4400 Week 5 Real Team Analysis Paper Example

Was the Launch Team Really a Team? Testing the Group That Opened the Bistro Against Katzenbach and Smith's Definition, Element by Element

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Walden University

MGMT 4400: Organizational Behavior and Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Was the Launch Team Really a Team? Testing the Group That Opened the Bistro Against Katzenbach and Smith's Definition, Element by Element

The Group

Everyone at Brennan Family Kitchens, the composite restaurant group in this course, called the four people who opened its Overland Park bistro "the launch team." They were the kitchen manager, the front-of-house manager, the bar lead and the head of prep, with the general manager overseeing them. The group formed in January, two months before opening, met weekly through the spring and stopped meeting in June, once the bistro was running. Each member came from a different part of the business: two from the group's other restaurants, two hired from outside. This paper asks whether they were a team in the technical sense or a working group with a team's name.

The Definition

Katzenbach and Smith (1993) set a demanding standard for a real team: a few people whose skills fit together, who share a purpose, goals and a way of working, and who hold one another, not just themselves, responsible for the results. They distinguish real teams from working groups, whose members pass along information and lend a hand, yet each answers only for an individual area, and the group's performance is simply the sum of its members' contributions. A working group is not a failure; it is the right form when the work does not require joint products. Robbins and Judge (2019) make the same distinction in describing work groups, whose output is the sum of individual inputs, and work teams, whose combined effort exceeds it. The question is which form the launch team took.

Six Elements, One Table

Table 1

The Launch Team Against Katzenbach and Smith's Six Elements

Composite case.

Three Separate Scoreboards

The decisive element is performance goals. Katzenbach and Smith argue that specific goals shared by the whole group are what turn a working group into a team, because they create work the members can only accomplish together. The launch team had no such goals. The owners gave each lead a separate target, so there were in effect three scoreboards: food cost, table turns and bar sales. Nothing measured how well the areas worked together, such as the time from order to table, which depends on the kitchen, the servers and the bar at once.

Mutual Accountability, Tested by the First Bad Week

The opening week provides a natural test of mutual accountability. Ticket times averaged over thirty minutes on the first Friday, and diners complained online. In the meeting that followed, the kitchen manager pointed to servers ringing in orders in batches, the front-of-house manager pointed to the kitchen's slow plating and the bar lead noted that drinks went out on time. Each member defended only that member's own area. Katzenbach and Smith describe exactly this pattern as the mark of a working group: members hold themselves accountable individually, not collectively.

Why the Group Never Became a Team

The missing elements were not an accident of personalities. The owners assigned the leads separately, each with an area to run and a number to hit, and the weekly meeting was organized as a round of updates, one area at a time, rather than as a session on shared problems. Nobody was asked to own the time a diner waited from order to plate, which crosses every area. In Katzenbach and Smith's terms, the group was designed as a working group from the start, and the label "team" described the owners' hopes rather than the structure they built.

Verdict

The launch team was a working group with a team's name. It passed the first two elements and partly the third, but failed the three that make a group a team: shared goals, a common approach and mutual accountability. Hackman (2002) argues that groups called teams often lack the conditions that let them function as teams, starting with a clear, shared direction, and the bistro's launch is a case in point.

Why It Matters and What Would Change It

The distinction matters because the bistro's lingering problems, slow ticket times on busy nights and friction between kitchen and servers, sit in the spaces between the leads' areas. A working group cannot fix problems no member owns. Giving the leads one shared goal, such as order-to-table time on weekend nights, with a shared review each week, would create the joint work that could make them a team. It would not need to replace their separate targets, only add one they could meet only together.

References

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (1993). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization. Harvard Business School Press.

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2019). Organizational behavior (18th ed.). Pearson.