INFO1111 Chap.8 Teamwork Frameworks and Team Dynamics
Teamwork Frameworks and Team Dynamics
This chapter covers the Week 4 teamwork lecture, which supplies most of the frameworks students are asked to name in quizzes and use in their reflections. It begins with what distinguishes a team from a group and with Hackman's account of successful teams: three signs of success and five conditions that raise the odds, from being a real team to expert coaching.
It sets out Salas's Big Five of teamwork, starting with leadership and running through mutual monitoring of performance, backup behaviour, adaptability and team orientation, held together by closed-loop communication, mutual trust and a shared mental model.
It introduces Belbin's nine team roles in social, thinking and action groups, Tuckman's model of team development, McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y, and psychological safety, which Google's Project Aristotle found to be the leading factor in team success. It closes with how student teams differ from commercial ones and what to do when a team stalls.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Groups, teams and computing team types
- 02
Hackman's three signs and five conditions
- 03
Salas's Big Five and coordinating mechanisms
- 04
Backup behaviour versus adaptability
- 05
Belbin's nine roles in three groups
- 06
Theory X, Theory Y and leadership style
- 07
Psychological safety and mistaken beliefs about teams
- 08
Student teams and repairing a stalled one
Worked example · free
Naming the frameworks in a team reflection
- +1Taking over a sick member's tasks with the plan unchanged is backup behaviour.
- +1Dropping a feature and adding a report because the brief changed is adaptability, a change to the plan itself.
- +1Closed-loop communication fits both moments: confirm each reallocation and each plan change has been received and understood.
Key terms
- Psychological Safety
- A belief held across a team that members may speak up and take risks without being embarrassed or punished.
- Backup Behaviour
- Shifting work to underused members when someone is overloaded, without changing the team's plan.
- Closed-loop Communication
- An exchange of at least three steps in which the sender confirms the message was received as intended.
- Shared Mental Model
- A common understanding of the task and of how members will interact, letting them anticipate each other.
- Team Constitution
- An agreement made early in a group's life about how members will work together and handle problems.
- Theory Y
- McGregor's managerial assumption that people can find work meaningful, take responsibility and show initiative.
Teamwork Frameworks and Team Dynamics FAQ
What is the difference between a group and a team?
A team is a group whose members have complementary skills, work towards a shared goal and coordinate their effort. A group of people working side by side does not automatically form one.
What are Salas's Big Five?
Leadership, mutual monitoring of performance, backup behaviour, adaptability and team orientation. Three coordinating mechanisms support them: closed-loop communication, mutual trust and a shared mental model. The lecture calls leadership the most important.
What did Google's Project Aristotle find?
Studying more than 180 teams between 2012 and 2014, it found psychological safety was the number one factor in team success, ahead of members' expertise and the team's structure.
What are Belbin's nine team roles?
Resource Investigator, Team-worker and Coordinator in the social group; Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist in the thinking group; Shaper, Implementer and Completer Finisher in the action group.
Am I penalised if a teammate does no work in the Skills Advanced assignment?
The brief says you are not penalised for other members' poor or missing work, provided you change the plan sensibly and record those changes in GitHub and in your report.
Exam move
Make a framework card for each model: Hackman, Salas, Belbin, Tuckman and McGregor, each with its parts and one sentence on when to use it in a reflection. Test the confusable pair separately by writing three events of your own and labelling each backup or adaptability. During your group project, keep a short log with dates: who did what, what changed, and how the change was communicated.
That log turns into evidence for the Skills Advanced reflection, where you are judged on how you managed the process rather than on whether every task was finished. Practise closed-loop communication in your team chat for one week: every request gets a reply and every reply gets a confirmation, and notice what it prevents. Before the quiz, rehearse the four mistaken beliefs, since they make good distractors.
After each team meeting, write two lines: one thing the team did that a framework would praise, and one it would criticise. By the end of semester those notes give you specific, dated examples instead of general impressions.
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