PMGT5872 · People and Communications
High-Performance & Virtual Teams
Week 11 brings the unit together around building high-performing teams: what makes teams succeed or fail, psychological safety, groupthink (Janis) and how to counter it, empowerment, and the specific challenges of leading virtual and dispersed teams. It is the final teaching week before the group presentations, and its themes — team performance factors, diversity, groupthink and virtual leadership — are prime material for the group and reflective tasks.
What this chapter covers
- 01Characteristics of high-performing teams: open communication, mutual trust, shared goals, flexible leadership
- 02Why teams fail (Burke & Barron): unclear purpose, poor problem-solving, lack of trust and recognition
- 03Factors affecting team performance: structure, size, cohesiveness, climate, psychological safety
- 04Psychological safety (Edmondson): trust and openness that reduce fear of failure
- 05Groupthink (Janis): causes (high cohesion, isolation, directive leadership) and prevention
- 06Empowerment's five keys: share information, create autonomy, allow self-direction, set objectives, communicate accountabilities
- 07Virtual teams: barriers (language, high/low-context cultures, no non-verbal cues, time zones)
- 08Leading virtual teams and the team charter: tech norms, formats, response-time expectations
Applied: strengthening a dispersed team and guarding against groupthink
- +2(a) Beyond cohesion, name two performance factors from the Week 11 list: for example psychological safety (are members safe to speak up and challenge?) and team climate/leadership behaviour, plus the virtual-team barrier of time zones and lost non-verbal cues that thins communication.
- +2(b) Groupthink (Janis) is the destructive pattern: high cohesion plus a directive senior voice suppresses critical evaluation, so the team converges on the loud voice's view and risks a poor decision. A safeguard: appoint a rotating devil's advocate or critical-evaluator role and have the leader withhold their opinion until others have spoken.
- +2(c) Leverage diversity by treating the three locations' different perspectives as an asset: actively invite each site's view (structured turn-taking so quieter or off-peak sites contribute), which both improves decisions and further counters groupthink.
- +2(d) Build in high-performing-team drivers: open communication and mutual trust, shared clear goals, respect for differences, and empowerment (share information, create autonomy, set explicit objectives and accountabilities). Naming two concretely — e.g. open communication and empowerment — with how to enact them across the virtual team completes the answer.
Key terms
- Psychological safety
- A team climate of trust and openness in which members feel safe to speak up, ask questions and admit mistakes without fear; it boosts communication, creativity and engagement (Edmondson).
- Groupthink
- Janis's failure mode where high cohesion overrides critical evaluation; caused by high cohesion, isolation from outside information and directive leadership, leading to poor decisions.
- Devil's advocate
- A deliberately assigned (often rotating) critical role that challenges the emerging consensus to counter groupthink and surface alternatives.
- Empowerment
- Enabling a team to act, via five keys: share information, create autonomy, allow self-direction, set explicit objectives and communicate accountabilities.
- Virtual team
- A dispersed team collaborating through digital channels; barriers include language, high- versus low-context cultures, absent non-verbal cues, status perception and time zones.
- Team charter
- An agreement setting a virtual team's technology norms, formats and etiquette, synchronisation plans, response-time expectations and information-sharing rules.
High-Performance & Virtual Teams FAQ
What causes groupthink and how do I prevent it?
Janis identifies three main causes: high group cohesion, isolation from outside information, and strong directive leadership. Together they let the desire for agreement override critical evaluation, so the team converges too quickly on a flawed decision. Prevention means building in structured dissent: assign a critical-evaluator or rotating devil's advocate, have the leader withhold their view until others speak, split into independent sub-groups, examine alternatives seriously, and bring in outside experts.
What is psychological safety and why does it matter for teams?
Psychological safety (Edmondson) is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — that you can ask a question, admit a mistake or challenge a decision without being punished or humiliated. It matters because it is one of the strongest factors in team performance: it encourages open communication, reduces fear of failure, and boosts creativity, engagement, retention and adaptability. It is also a direct antidote to groupthink, since it makes dissent safe.
What extra challenges do virtual teams face?
Virtual and dispersed teams add barriers on top of ordinary team dynamics: language differences, high- versus low-context cultural styles, limited perception with few or no non-verbal cues, status-perception issues, and time-zone gaps that slow communication. Leading them well means being deliberate — a team charter that sets technology norms, formats, synchronisation plans and response-time expectations, and a leadership approach that envisions, energises and enables the dispersed team.
Can AI help me with the Week 11 team frameworks?
Yes. Sia can explain psychological safety, walk through the causes and safeguards of groupthink, quiz you on the drivers of high-performing teams, and help you structure a multi-part team case for your group task. It explains the method and checks your reasoning; it does not complete graded assessment for you, and academic-integrity rules apply.
Exam move
Week 11 is prime assessment material, so learn it for application: be able to spot groupthink from the cohesion-plus-directive-leader pattern and prescribe structured-dissent safeguards, explain psychological safety and why it drives performance, and list the high-performing-team drivers and empowerment keys. For virtual teams, know the barriers and the team-charter fix. Practise the multi-part case structure, since the group and reflective tasks reward exactly this kind of applied analysis. Confirm the group-presentation and reflective-task requirements on Canvas.
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