Effectiveness of Work Relationships

What is the unit of performance in organizations today –Individuals or Teams? ‘Teams’ would be the answer at most places.

What do we mean by teams? What is the nature of teams? Is a team a self contained unit with a boss and a set of subordinates or a complex network of independent individuals/team collaborating on a project?

The visual I have in mind when I think of a business organization is this vast criss-crosses and interconnections of various teams, with different kinds of working relationships between them.

So there are individual and multiple teams and nature of interaction/relationships between them varies.

How would you measure effectiveness of working relationships in teams? e.g. - How would you measure levels of partnership between a line and staff (HR) function, or levels of service orientation shown by a service team towards customers?

The building blocks of relationships are ‘interactions’. If there are no interactions, there can be no relationship. If there are interactions, it is not necessary that an effective relationship exists. Presence of interactions is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.

So the first thing to do would obviously to list out what are the interactions (as mandated by process) that two people/teams would need to have.

But does just the presence of minimum number of interactions ensure effectiveness of relationships?

We would also have to look at quality of interactions too. How does one figure out quality of interactions?

This is an area I am still exploring but I think the answer would be both generic and context specific. Let me illustrate through an example.

How do we measure the effectiveness of interactions in a partnership relationship? A few things that can be observed are:

• Is there collaboration in:

o goal setting

o work planning

o implementation

o review

• Are successes and failures owned/attributed equally?

• Are all stakeholders involved in celebration of successes?

• Are interactions between two/multiple teams limited to only the process or is there discretion shown in interacting more number of times than as mandated by the process?

I do feel that i am still scratching the surface when it comes to measuring ‘effectiveness of relationships’. How would you go about measuring the same? Do you know of research in this area?

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Sourav