Literature Review

Prior to the formal research study, a literature review was conducted. The review concentrated on publications from 1994 through 1998. Despite this time frame, materials published earlier were also reviewed if they were particularly relevant to our interest.

Two conclusions became obvious about team development in projects. First, there is not a large body of published information that is concerned with team development in projects. Second, the books published on the general subject of project management give little space and attention to the subject of team development. When they do address the subject, they make small use of the information that is available on the subject. A typical example is Harold Kerzner's book, Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling (Kerzner 1995). This book is widely used and regularly revised and reprinted. The fifth edition of this book has 1,126 pages of text, and is one of the most comprehensive books published on project management. A total of five pages are devoted to team development. There are 284 entries in the bibliography of this fifth edition of the book. Of this number, two entries deal with team development in projects. One is from 1971 and the other is from 1974.

Although there is a lack of published information on team development in projects and not much space given to the subject by authors of books on project management, we cannot interpret this to mean that there is a lack of belief that team development in projects is important. Most papers and books on the general subject of project management typically acknowledge the importance of developing the project team and note that the project manager should give attention to this development (Baker and Baker 1992; Kerzner 1995; Kezsbom 1989; Lock 1996).

Some authors have drawn attention to possible dangers and limitations of teams, but no one has suggested that team development is not a desirable characteristic of projects and the groups within projects (Fleming and Koppleman 1997; Williams 1997). Most information reported about projects generally supports the notion that the better the project develops itself as a team, the better will be the performance of the project.

This position is fully congruent with the information reported generally about team development in organizations, i.e., that organizations which go to a team-centered structure improve their performance (Kerzner 1995; Rosenau and Moran 1993; Frame 1995). The success of production teams, process improvement teams, marketing teams, sales teams, research teams, cross-functional teams, supplier-customer teams, self-managed teams, and a host of other kinds of teams have been incontrovertibly established. There are no traditional functions like planning, research, product development, design, production, marketing, and selling that are not being done more and more by teams (Katzenbach and Smith 1993; Kinlaw 1998).

Much has been written about the benefits of teams for improving performance. An analysis of the role that teams have in continuous improvement (Frangos 1993; Katzenbach and Smith 1993; Kinlaw 1998; Romig 1996; Wellins et al. 1994) has underscored the potential power of team approaches. Teams have been cited as being the best resource for creating new knowledge and ideas, fully utilizing the competencies of people, ensuring broad influence of the most competent people, building commitment, and managing uncertainty and change.

Teams are clearly the organizing principle for improvement. Work is done through systems or processes that cannot be understood or improved so long as people are encouraged to think that they perform independent functions. The traditional "wire diagram" of organizations does not describe how work is accomplished. The growth of the use of cross-functional teams in projects is a clear testimony to this fact (Fleming and Kopplemant 1997; Hauptman and Hirgi 1996; Kezxbom 1989). Furthermore, continuous improvement in organizations, as well as in projects, is best supported when customers partner with suppliers and form teams (Catledge and Potts 1996; Larson 1997).

Song, Souder, and Dyer (1997) studied sixty-five Japanese projects and found that team skills in a project were a predictor of the technical proficiency demonstrated in the project. Larson (1997) examined 291 construction projects and found that partnering (i.e., creating customer-supplier teams) had a positive affect on meeting schedule, controlling costs, technical performance, meeting customer needs, avoiding litigation, and overall results. McMichael (1994) described the dramatic results achieved by partnering and the creation of Boeing's Spares Distribution Center as a world-class facility.

There is without question, a clear belief in the importance of teams and team development. There is however ambiguity about the specific details of exactly what team and team development mean. Of greater concern, there are few specific guidelines or references for project managers to use when forming a project. The majority of team models are borrowed from traditional organizations without any modification for project structures. In addition, there is little research to determine how to optimize performance in project teams.

Most writers use the term project team in reference to the group of people assigned to a project (Catledge and Potts 1996; Kerzner 1995; Kinney and Panko 1996; Lock 1996). Rosenau and Moran (1993) define the project team in this sense: "The project team is people who work on the project and report administratively to the project manager." We found no cases in which the project as a team was differentiated from the project as a group. The qualitative differences that exist between groups, teams, and superior teams were not addressed (Kinlaw 1981, 1989). We can conclude that the term, project team, is used almost wholly to denote collectively the people in a project and not to denote the qualitative aspects of a project group.

Team as a term is rarely defined in the literature on project management. The case might be that there already exists a consensus among its users about what it means and, therefore, it does not need to be defined further. A more likely possibility is that the full importance of defining the specific characteristics of a team has not been realized.

There are few research studies that try to identify the characteristics of successful teams in projects. Various authors list characteristics that they associate with superior teams. However, one of the problems in defining the characteristics of successful teams is that most authors do not make a clear distinction between team development and team performance. Having clear goals and understanding priorities is regularly identified as a characteristic of successful teams in and out of projects. But, is having clear goals a result of other conditions that exist in a team, and should having clear goals be considered a characteristic of performance or a characteristic of team development? It is of course probable that having clear goals and priorities can be used to measure both team development and team performance. However, the greater clarity that we can bring to the meaning of team development and its characteristics, the greater precision we can have in defining how teams develop and what can be done to develop them.