Team performance: does working better across boundaries matter?
Interventions to improve team performance often focus on what happens among team members. Yet managers also face another question: which relationships with other units need to be organised so that work can move forward?
What the literature establishes
Deborah G. Ancona and David F. Caldwell (1992, Administrative Science Quarterly) studied the external activities of product development teams and their relationships with performance. Their work distinguishes activities such as representing the team to senior management, coordinating with external counterparts and scanning the environment. It suggests treating these activities as components of teamwork, rather than incidental relationship-building.
Finding a contact is not enough
Morten T. Hansen (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly), in a study of relationships between organisational units, shows that weak ties facilitate the search for useful knowledge but can hinder its transfer when that knowledge is complex. The mechanism therefore distinguishes two tasks: locating a resource and managing to use it. A relationship sufficient to identify a specialist is not necessarily sufficient to integrate that person's expertise into the team's work.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that a high-performing team should multiply its contacts and cross-functional meetings. These studies do not justify that prescription: different relationships serve different needs, and maintaining them takes time. The aim is not maximum openness, but a relationship suited to the dependency that needs addressing. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot specify
These studies draw on observations in organisational settings, rather than experiments randomly assigning ways of cooperating to teams. They provide neither an optimal number of contacts nor a universal rule for coordination. In practice, counting exchanges without examining what they unblock therefore risks rewarding relationship activity rather than progress.
A practical check in Bâle
Within SHR's « Performance d'équipe » programme, one possible exercise in Basel is to track the external dependencies of a pharmaceutical or life sciences project involving international R&D and Rhine logistics. Over four weeks, record each blocking request sent to another unit, its date, the responsible contact and the date on which work can actually resume. The measure is the median time to resolution, calculated for resolved requests and reported alongside the number of requests still open at the end of the period. After clarifying responsibilities at the interfaces, repeat the exercise over a comparable period: this comparison provides a local monitoring indicator, without on its own establishing a causal effect of the training. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Basel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Team Performance in Basel
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