Pfeiffer Industries President Smith

Re: Optimizing Team Performance

Creating teams has galvanized our employees together around common goals and led to greater level of achievement, yet there is much work still to be done. I agree with your assessment of team performance, and am writing to respond to the several questions and concerns you listed in your latest memo on this subject. I will also explain how I plan on fixing the situation in the R&D team that tends to lead to analysis-paralysis, and their continual shifting from one project to another, with development timeframes slipping as a result. In another team GroupThink has set in and everyone is afraid to disagree with each other. I will end this memo with my recommendations on how to proceed.

Questions on Creating and Sustaining Teams

Your questions relating to the size of each team, determining their staffing and skills composition,...

First, beginning with the size of each team, numerous empirical studies have been done showing performance is proportional not to size of staff but by specialization and shared task ownership (Mueller, 111). Another study suggests that the size of a team is also predicated on the transformational leadership and emotional intelligence (EI) skill sets of the manager (Rodriguez, 562). What these two studies indicate is that the more self-motivated team members are, the larger the team can become and more efficient it is in accomplishing its goals (Mueller, 111)
(Rodriguez, 562). As we're seeing a situation in Pfeiffer Industries of low to mid-levels of self-motivation, it's best to keep the size of the teams small and focused on a shared, common goal. When teams get too large, there is ample room for social loafing and for abdicating ones'…