Management

Mark Mortensen

Team Player

Jennifer Westlake | It's 9:00 am Do you know where your team is?

Claudio Calligaris

Do you know who's on your team? You probably think you do, but how can you be sure? What are the chances that your colleagues would agree with you? Mark Mortensen's answer will surprise you.

Mortensen made the move from Stanford's Department of Management Science and Engineering to McGill's Faculty of Management in August. An assistant professor of organizational behavior, his doctoral dissertation explored the causes and effects of team boundary disagreements.

Conducting surveys for his dissertation, Mortensen was surprised by the conflicting answers of employees who were asked to identify their managers and colleagues. Of 43 teams made up of four to 20 members, not one was identified consistently.

In follow-up interviews, team members were confident that their lists were accurate. "Everybody is sure they know exactly who is on their team, and they're also sure that, of course, there is no disagreement."

People react viscerally when team boundary disagreement is revealed, says Mortensen. "When we think of disagreement, we think that someone is wrong. Maybe it's not that someone is wrong, there are just different models of the team. It's not necessarily a bad thing that these different models exist at the same time."

But if you are concerned about efficiency and productivity, you want to understand how and why these disagreements occur. Mortensen found that interdependence between team members and the structure of work flow caused the confusion.

"Teams that suffer from boundary disagreement tend to have more interpersonal conflicts, lower shared identity and also have more difficulty creating team level memory, so that has implications for knowledge management."

Asked about whether academics might experience team boundary disagreement, Mortensen laughs. "Every time I give a talk on these issues, one of the quickest reactions of the academics in the room is, 'Oh, it's just like committees.' You have issues of multiple memberships: how much does that effect your perceptions of the team boundaries?"

More and more people, particularly those in the high-tech sectors, are part of teams that are geographically distributed across one or more continents. However wide your bandwidth, you will run into some confusion in these situations

Let's say you're working at a multinational corporation with employees in Montreal, New York and Tokyo (where today is literally tomorrow). Your team has a deadline, and you've been working overtime to meet it. Yesterday you emailed your colleague in Tokyo for their input and/or report. Where is it?

The question Mortensen would ask is, how much do you know about where exactly your team members are? Could it be that your colleague in Tokyo is at home celebrating a major national holiday you know nothing about?

It's exactly this kind of contextual knowledge we take for granted when communicating with co-workers who live in the same city and meet on a regular basis. Geographically distributed teams can have a better chance of creating and sharing a group identity if they have an opportunity to meet face to face.

"Distributed work has been around for hundreds of years -- the Hudson's Bay Company is a great example of this. But it's becoming much more common and much more fast paced with the advances in technology."

And we all know that the most sophisticated communication systems bring with them new problems of their own.

Mortensen experienced this first-hand while developing online educational environments working with the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He quickly saw how tension could arise between team members. Rifts in the team can open up if a member suddenly realizes during a video-conference that somebody just off camera has been cracking jokes that you can't see or hear.

Mortensen's work raises questions about existing studies in social psychology and organizational behaviour. If, in working in teams, "everybody is identifying very strongly with their team, but they understand that team differently, what does that mean?"

In 2004 he expects to publish two articles, one on conflict and shared identity in distributed teams and another on boundary disagreement.

Meanwhile, Mortensen has been enjoying life on and off campus. "One of the things that attracted me to McGill was the more international focus, both among the faculty members and the students." He's also enjoying Montreal's multicultural character, and is looking forward to improving his French.