Team Dysfunction: Leadership, Communication, and Negotiation

Identifying the Team's Core Problems

The main teamwork problems occurring among the team members include a lack of communication and a lack of clarity regarding the team's goals — and therefore no shared sense of how success is to be achieved. An effective team is one that is productive, personally satisfied, and committed to its members (Schermerhorn & Uhl-Bien, 2014). Building on that idea, teams should be motivated, united by a shared sense of values, emotionally stable and supportive, and dedicated to achieving performance benchmarks (Schermerhorn & Uhl-Bien, 2014).

As the de facto leader, Harrington has to be proactive in bringing teammates together to discuss their agenda. However, this is not happening because Harrington is mainly reactive, and the team members feel that he is really in competition with Smithers and cares only about earning a promotion for himself. There is general dissatisfaction among the group, as the formal leader, Vonich, has essentially washed his hands of the team and told Harrington — who has never led a team before — to handle everything. Ultimately, this comes down to Vonich being an absent leader. As Schyns and Schilling (2013) argue, a poor leader whose lack of good leadership and personal involvement has a measurably negative effect on the team overall.

Leadership Styles: Reactive and Distant

The leadership style evidenced by Harrington is reactive, while that evidenced by Vonich is distant. Between the two, very little is being accomplished by the group. Instead of identifying clear goals, Harrington insists on more research from the members. The leadership problems stem from the fact that the leader is a novice who does not know how to integrate team members so that they work together rather than in opposition to one another.

Tuckman's Stages and the Challenge of Communication

What needs to be negotiated is how to achieve new product development. Harrington wants more information in order to set an appropriate course, but the rest of the team is frustrated by the way team meetings consistently end in arguments. No one is willing to listen. This dynamic runs counter to Tuckman's five stages of group development, which hold that for a team to become functional it must first pass through five conditions: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.

These five stages represent the framework that must be navigated for the team to succeed. The forming stage is the first and represents the moment when the group is coming together. It is often the stage at which anxiety, fears, doubts, and questions are expressed. Harrington's team needs to move past this stage in order to advance and become successful. Effective communication is critical here. People communicate using both verbal and nonverbal cues, and these need to be identified by a leader who knows how to respond with social and emotional intelligence (Sanchez-Nunez, Patti, & Holzer, 2015). Without a proper understanding of the different ways people communicate — and how to respond to them — leadership will lack the ability to genuinely bring a team together.

This is why Harrington is having such a difficult time. Without support from Vonich, the full burden falls on him, and he ends up sparring with other team members because he does not know how to listen, incorporate what they are saying into the group's objective, and negotiate a positive outcome that everyone can agree upon.