cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

The underpinning theory• The more similar the team members are, the sooner they will reachcommon understanding.• The more disparate the team members, the longer it takes for understandingto occur.• The more similar the team members, the quicker the decision will bemade, but the greater the possibility of error through exclusion ofsome possibilities.• The more disparate the team members, the longer the decisionmakingprocess will be, but the more views and opinions will be takeninto account.McCaulley also recognized that teams valuing different types can ultimatelyexperience less conflict.A particular case worth mentioning is the management team.Management teams both in the United States and the United Kingdomare skewed from the natural distribution of Myers-Briggs types within thewhole population. Typically they are composed of fewer people of thefeeling types and fewer people of the perceiving types. This means thatmanagement teams, when making decisions around change, are morelikely to put emphasis on the business case for change, and less likely tothink or worry about the effect on people. You can see the result of this inmost change programmes in most organizations. They are also morelikely to want to close things down, having made a decision, rather thankeep their options open – thus excluding the possibility of enhancing andimproving on the changes or responding to feedback.There are some simple reminders of the advantages and disadvantagesof the preferences for teams making decisions about managing changewithin organizations, as listed in Table 2.5.Belbin’s team typesWhat people characteristics need to be present for a team to functioneffectively? Meredith Belbin (1981) has been researching this questionfor a number of years. The purpose of his research was to see whetherhigh and low performing teams had certain characteristics. He looked atteam members and found that in the higher performing teams,88