MBA-inspired research on fluid teams garners Wall Street Journal profile

New classroom-inspired research focused on organizational reshuffling from the Faculty of Business Administration at Simon Fraser University is garnering significant international attention, thanks to its publication in the August edition of the Wall Street Journal’s Executive Adviser.

Gervase Bushe, the lead researcher and a professor of leadership and organizational development at SFU Business (pictured right), looked at how to enable the success of “fluid teams” – those workplace teams that are subject to a higher rate of turnover.

His work was inspired by MBA students from his classroom, who as part of their class project identified ways to overcome some of the problems associated with fluid teams, which include a lack of cohesion and low commitment.

The students — Alexandra Chu, Oba Harding, Andrew Johnson, Charles Lo and Jessica Oman – not only identified solutions to unstable membership within organizations, but also coined the the term fluid teams.

Some of the strategies that Prof. Bushe and his students recommend for companies experiencing high fluidity within teams include:

– Standardizing team members’ roles as much as possible, so they don’t need to acquire lots of knowledge on the job
– Making sure teams have some stable membership. Find individuals with lots of accumulated knowledge and keep them on teams to guide new members and help them get the hang of the job.
– Because it’s difficult to achieve a shared approach, making team members’ roles as independent as possible, so that they don’t need to develop shared ways of thinking.
– Making each team member’s actions highly visible to avoid individuals getting a “free ride” at others’ expense

According to Prof. Bushe, the subject of enhancing fluid teams caught his attention because “it breaks all the rules. The way to design organizations for teams where people are always coming and going is in some ways the opposite of how to design for normal teams,” he said.

Bushe has been studying and consulting to teams and team-based organizations for close to 30 years. His recent publications include “Clear Leadership,” a book about the skills required for leading and working in highly collaborative organizations, and a paper on group development and team effectiveness, co-authored with Graeme Coetzer, which won the Douglas McGregor Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science in 2007.

To read the article in the Wall Street Journal in its entirety, visit:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704100604575145950278914776.html

The Wall Street Journal’s August edition of WSJ Executive Adviser can be viewed at:
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/executive-adviser-08232010.html