Perspectives

Making steering committees work well

There are countless books, reports and research papers about how to manage projects, but very little attention has been paid to steering committees. The title of this article (Loch et al., 2017) is Supervising Projects You Don’t Fully Understand. Rarely do the titles of research papers make me smile! Steering committees form a vital link between a project and the business, and yet in my experience there are very rarely terms of reference. The membership is usually selected on a democratic representation of the business operations that will benefit from the success of the project and far less often on whether the members have the skills to guide both the project and the expectations of the business.

The authors conducted in-depth interviews with 17 senior executives or chief executive officers (CEOs) from different industries on 29 projects. The participants were provided with a set of questions beforehand (which are helpfully set out in an appendix to the article) and they were asked to consider two ‘difficult’ strategic projects for which standard milestone oversight processes were insufficient: one project where steering committee (SC) supervision had worked well and one where it had not worked as hoped. The five major issues identified were the composition of SC, goal agreement, project team motivation and control, intelligence gathering, and managing surprises and change. The authors focus on the final two of these.

Intelligence gathering is all about making decisions with insufficient information. A quotation from one of the participants sums up a common situation very well.

Some people on SCs do not invest the effort to question and insist until they have a clear understanding of the fundamental logic and drivers. This has two reasons, (a) because they are too busy (and do not have enough time for this important responsibility), or (b) because they do not want to admit that they don’t know—after all, when you have reached a certain seniority, you become more reluctant to admit in front of the “troops” that there is stuff of which you are ignorant.

I can see that any organization would benefit this article by being able to draw up a code of good practice for steering committees. The article is exceptionally well written and the way in which the authors have interlaced direct comments from participants is exemplary.

Team roles and responsibilities

In the introduction to this article (Driskell et al., 2017), the authors highlight that roles are important in teams because they represent patterns of behavior that are interrelated with the activities of other team members in pursuit of the overall team goal. I have to admit that I was unaware that the term role comes from the French rôle, which originally referred to the rolls of paper on which actors’ parts were written and often read to the actors if they forgot their lines. No matter which team sport you support, you will be very aware of each of the roles that each player in (for example) a soccer team takes on, sometimes changing in the course of a game in response to an emerging situation.

The core question that is addressed in this article is whether there is a basic structure of roles in task teams. In other words, is there a primary set of role dimensions that are descriptive of role performance in task teams, and can this model be used to understand how role performance relates to team functioning and performance?

The view of the authors is that role behavior in groups can be described in terms of the three broad dimensions of (a) individual prominence or dominance, (b) sociability, and (c) group goal facilitation or task orientation. The dominance dimension captures the distinction between behavior that is dominant versus submissive, active versus passive, and seeking control versus deference. The sociability dimension captures the distinction between behavior that is sociable, friendly, and agreeable and behavior that is withdrawn, unfriendly, and aloof. The task orientation dimension captures the distinction between behavior that is oriented toward the solution of task problems and behavior that shirks or evades task responsibilities. From this, they develop their Tracking Roles In and Across Domains (TRIAD) model.

To evaluate this model, the authors (or rather their students) worked through 154 research papers to see if the outcomes of previous research could be correlated against the TRIAD model. A hierarchical cluster analysis was then undertaken which resulted in 13 clusters where there was a good degree of correlation of aspects from the three dimensions. As a piece of research, the results are certainly of interest but I am not entirely convinced by the view the authors take on how this analysis might be used in practice. It is easy to comment that the attention seeker and negative roles are characterized by very low task orientation, which suggests that persons fulfilling these roles contribute little to overall team goals. Life is not like that! However, the article does have merit in identifying the range of roles that could be represented by team members and give team leaders a formal basis for considering whether the balance is appropriate for the task ahead. The authors do highlight that this literature analysis does need empirical validation, and I hope that someone takes up this challenge in the near future.

How leaders influence the outcome of meetings

When I started to read this article (Odermatt et al., 2017), my initial reaction was that the role of leadership in meeting outcomes has been studied quite extensively. It appears that this is not the case in terms of assessing the outcomes of meetings from both the leaders and the participant in a series of meetings. The authors gathered data from a total of 63 team meetings, which constituted a total of 359 meeting participants, from different organizations in Switzerland. All meetings were led by a supervisor and included at least four team members who discussed work-related matters. The most common employment sectors included in the sample were finance/insurance (40%), manufacturing (20%), and health care (13%).

Two survey methods were used for this project. The first of these was a Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire (LBDQ) that was originally developed in 1957 and has been revised a number of times since. What is not clear from the article is exactly which version was used. In the final analysis, it is probably not a major factor but it does require non-academic readers of this article to track down the LBDQ and spend some time working out how the authors have used it. The survey on meeting satisfaction comes from a paper by Rogelberg which is available as a download (Rogelberg et al., 2010). The authors have clearly put a lot of effort into a project that could have a significant impact on meeting outcomes and yet very few managers would have access to the original papers. I would have appreciated at least a summary of the main elements of both the LBDQ and the Rogelberg survey being included to make some sense to me of the survey analysis.

The outcome of the research is however quite clear. The extent to which participants regard the leader as showing considerate behavior to the team has a significant bearing on the quality of a team meeting. There is also a useful discussion in the article about the differentiation between task-oriented elements of a meeting and the relationship-oriented elements. The latter include ensuring that all the team members have had an adequate level of input into the meeting.

Due note should be taken of the work of Professor Steven Rogelberg. There is a good paper of Rogelberg and his research team (Rogelberg et al., 2012) entitled Wasted Time and Money in Meetings: Increasing Return on Investment which complements the research published in this article. It is published in the SAGE journal Small Group Research.

Remote working – The impacts on family life

Over the last few years, the topic of whether remote working (in earlier times referred to as teleworking or even telecommuting) was of equal benefit to the employee and the employer has given rise to a great deal of discussion. The most notable example was the decision by Marissa Mayer to issue a ban on remote working almost as soon as she was appointed CEO of Yahoo in 2013. Most of the discussion and the research has focused on the employee–employer relationship. A different approach has been adopted by the authors (Eddleston and Mulki, 2017) to explore how remote workers manage the work–family interface, particularly focusing on how the physical integration of work and family in the home influences family-to-work conflict (FWC) and work-to-family conflict (WFC). Their focus is on the extent to which the integration of work and family’s physical boundaries might exacerbate the stress of remote workers by creating confusion as to which role, work or family, should take precedence in the home. As someone who has worked from home for almost 20 years, I have experienced these pressures firsthand. My wife Cynthia has been immensely supportive when I lock myself into the office to work on my PC but finds the energy that I impart to Skype conference calls somewhat distracting. I have also discovered that my calls can be heard by neighbors walking past our house!

The research reported in the article seeks to (a) explore how working from home creates benefits and challenges for remote workers, (b) understand how working from home affects remote workers’ ability to transition between work and family roles, and (c) investigate how male and female remote workers manage the competing demands of work and family. This gender impact turns out to be especially important.

A total of 52 semi-structured interviews were conducted during a 6-month period with sales and service employees who worked remotely from home. The informants were from the United States but dispersed all over the country. They were interviewed using an interview guide that is helpfully included in the published article. One of the attributes of this article is that there are many quotes from the interviews. The outcomes of this qualitative study were then used to develop a quantitative survey–based study of 300 employees working in two large technology companies in sales and support roles.

The results are very interesting indeed. Although the authors initially expected remote workers who fully integrated work and family to experience the least work–family conflict based on the person–environment fit perspective of boundary theory, the qualitative study revealed that in fact efforts to minimize integration seemed to alleviate work–family conflict. The results from the survey-based study supported these findings by demonstrating that high integration increases the WFC and FWC of remote workers.

In addition, the results regarding gender suggest that various facets of the work–family boundary can differentially affect FWC and WFC. Although the authors found that male remote workers need to highly segment their work and family roles if they are to minimize WFC, we also found that a persistent engagement in work did not harm men’s WFC. Conversely, for female remote workers, the integration of work and family roles was not as devastating to their WFC as it was to that of men. However, an inability to disengage from work significantly increased women’s WFC. These results contrast with the accepted view that home-based work may be a solution to women’s problems with balancing work and family and suggest the manner in which work breaches the family domain has a differential effect on both men and women.

The level of detail about both the research methodology and the outcomes of the analysis of both qualitative and quantitative surveys is admirable, and this is an article that should be read by any manager with responsibilities for remote working.

Information culture and collaborative information seeking

The final article in this column takes the concept of teamworking into a different direction. Over the last few years, there has been a substantial amount of interest in the concept of collaborative information seeking (CIS). CIS is an information access activity related to a problem-solving activity that, implicitly or explicitly, involves human beings interacting with other human(s) directly and/or through texts (e.g. documents and figures) as information sources in a work task–related information-seeking process. This may take place either in a specific workplace setting or in a more open community or environment. In terms of searching (though CIS is wider than search), all current search applications in both the public and enterprise environments are designed for a single user, whereas the trend in organizations is to have employees working together in teams. There has also been an increasing interest in the concepts and implications of information culture. The authors (Hansen and Widen 2017) have considered the extent to which CIS and information culture impact each other based on a very thorough review of the literature.

They consider that previous research in information culture and CIS has targeted similar aspects and thus they complement each other. Information culture focuses on contextual factors, whereas CIS also integrates the situational dimension. Combining these focuses is a step toward a better understanding of complex information processes. Common aspects like trust, aims, and relations show that these are truly important when studying information seeking, sharing and use in organizations and groups. Organizations involving information intensive work are usually complex systems with both visible and invisible as well as explicit and implicit relationships and dependencies. In order to support CIS in an organization’s information culture, the authors consider that it will be important to unfold the palette of factors and dimensions that affect the work tasks on an individual, group and organizational level.

The authors make a compelling case that it would be more rewarding if studies of CIS would include aspects of information culture and conceptualized as embedded in a larger information culture environment. The challenge for anyone working on the benefits of collaborative information seeking is that as yet there are no well-developed CIS applications, though there are a few experimental applications. This comes as a considerable surprise to me as the benefits seem to me to be very beneficial. I should note that the bibliography for this article is very wide ranging, listing many papers that were new to me despite my tracking of both CIS and information culture research for some years.