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Within a short time frame, seven diverse team members assemble to write a business plan for a new company and struggle to define their roles, make decisions together, and resolve conflict. Henry Tam, a second-year Harvard MBA student, who joins an aspiring start-up company and a fellow classmate to enter the school's business plan contest. The founders of the company are two internationally accomplished musicians and a 1987 Harvard MBA, all Russian, who are trying to create, produce, and sell a unique computer-based music game. Conflict builds as the team generates a range of ideas about how to market their product, but has trouble agreeing on which ideas to pursue. Henry Tam wrestles with how to fix the problems that have hindered the team's progress.

This note which describes the architecture and processes that characterize effective teams, begins by detailing the steps involved in designing a team, from diagnosing the complexity, interdependence, and objectives of the task to harnessing the key resources teams need from their environment. It describes the qualities to search for when selecting team members, including finding the right number of people, individual skills along both technical and interpersonal dimensions, and a mix of skills appropriate for the task. Once the team is designed, team leaders and members need to shape and monitor team processes, starting with the team launch. Describes how to diagnose emergent team processes such as information exchange, collaboration, decision making, impression formation, and underlying identity dynamics. Includes steps managers can take to improve dysfunctional team processes such as restructuring and shaping the social forces within the team. Ends with a discussion of bridging differences in teams across both geographic and cultural divides.

Jim McCusker must guide a group decision-making process aimed at getting input and buy-in from key people in California, Mexico, and Austria to choose a shop floor IT system for Flextronics. McCusker is Flextronics' account manager for the Microsoft Xbox project. Geographical distance and time pressure make it difficult for all the relevant parties to assemble in person in one location. In a company culture that values fast, decisive action, McCusker wonders whether he has the authority to make the decision himself and, if not, how he should involve the other parties who are keenly interested in the outcome.

This note explains how identity dynamics underlie many of the observable interpersonal problems that team members encounter, ranging from lack of participation and low involvement to misunderstandings and dysfunctional emotional conflict. It provides a framework for understanding how to recognize and manage identity issues in teams, including sections on communicating identities, forming impressions, and the consequences of the resulting level of congruence between people's identities and others' impressions of them. Outlines action steps managers can take to increase the level of interpersonal congruence in their teams, which should, in turn, make their teams more effective.

The coach of the varsity Army crew team at West Point assembled his top eight rowers into the first crew team and the second tier of rowers into the second team using objective data on individual performance. As the second boat continually beat the first boat in races, the coach attempted to discern the team dynamics causing these aberrant results. By using very clean, objective performance data, the case makes clear that a team can be more (or less) than the sum of its individual parts, but allows students to analyze the factors that make this true.

Supplements the (A) case.

The American Red Cross has a system for structuring, staffing, and leading teams to review its local chapters. Mirroring professional services firms that use teams to serve clients, this system provides detailed guidelines to increase individual team member's efficiency and thoroughness. The protagonist at Red Cross headquarters who designed the system, however, is concerned that the structure she has provided is detracting from the teams' overall creativity and integration. Highlights the trade-offs of providing teams with too little structure (e.g., inefficiency, variable quality of team's work products) vs. too much structure (e.g., team members have little opportunity to utilize their expertise and creativity).