A Study of Lencioni's Model of Dysfunctional Groups

Introduction

Employees can make or break an organization. Employee resources must be used properly to provide benefits and pursue organizational goals. Many jobs are done in teams and team work is becoming a norm. According to Garnet Research in future, “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They'll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization.” Corporation and its workforce are becoming borderless resulting in more and more teamwork. Many teams work well together, but others fall short. IBM’s Watson is an example of a diverse, productive team that developed a (https://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-healthcaregov-website-failed-at-launch-in-one-slide-2013-11) is an example of a dysfunctional team that did not produced product as planned and a new team had to make it functional. The question is why some groups succeed and others fail. Productive teams have been studied extensively in the literature, we focus on dysfunctional teams in this paper.

Teamwork is an important part of organizations and according to the U. S. Department of Labor, “When everyone in the workplace works together to accomplish goals, everyone achieves more”. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) defined team as, “A small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goal, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable”. In a borderless world, teams are becoming diverse and work 24/7 irrespective of time and place, distance, language, diversity or differences. Many teams do not succeed. Social loafing, fatigue, diversity, and group size are some of the factors often mentioned as contributing to this failure. One of the factor, diversity, and its impact on groups, has been studied by many researchers (Harrison & Klein, 2007;, Boiney, 2001) who have emphasized the importance of understanding and managing diversity to improve creativity and the quality of team performance. There are no clear results from these research and literature has provided conflicting evidence that either supports or opposes diverse group performance. Can diversity lead to dysfunctional groups? This paper attempts to address this issue.

The first section describes current literature on dysfunctional groups, followed by the model and experiment, and a discussion of dysfunctional groups. In the following section we discuss modification of Lencioni’s model. In addition, we provide a summary of the limitations of this study and directions for future research.