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

The underpinning theorytypically pressures and priorities can push people into silo mentality andaway from the team, the team operating processes can act like a lubricant,enabling healthy team functioning to continue.Team interpersonal relationshipsThe team members must actively communicate among themselves. Toachieve clear understanding of goals and roles, the team needs to worktogether to agree and clarify them. Operating processes must also bediscussed and agreed.To achieve this level of communication, the interpersonal relationshipswithin the team need to be in a relatively healthy state. Glaser and Glaser(1992) found that the literature on team effectiveness ‘prescribes opencommunication that is assertive and task focused, as well as creatingopportunities for giving and receiving feedback aimed at the developmentof a high trust climate’.In times of change, individual stress levels rise and there is a tendencyto focus more on the task than the people processes. High levels of trustwithin a team are the bedrock for coping with conflict.Inter-team relationsTeams cannot work in isolation with any real hope of achieving theirorganizational objectives. The nature of organizations today – complex,sophisticated and with increasing loose and permeable boundaries –creates situations where a team’s goals can rarely be achieved withoutinput from and output to others.However smart a team has been inaddressing the previous four categories, theauthors have found in consulting withnumerous organizations that attentionneeds to be paid to inter-team relations nowmore than ever before. This is because of therise of strategic partnerships and globalorganizations. Teams need to connect more.It is also because the environment ischanging faster and is more complex, sokeeping in touch with information outsideof your own team is a basic survival strategy.76