Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership

Amy C. Edmondson; Jean-François  Harvey

Book | 2017

Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership

by Amy C. Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey

Abstract

Today's global enterprises increasingly involve collaborative work by teams of experts operating across different professions, organizations, and industries. Extreme Teaming provides new insights into the world of complex, cross-industry projects and the ways they must be managed. The authors analyze contemporary cases that expose the complex demands of cross-boundary collaboration on management and inform our understanding of teams. Containing powerful insights and practical guidelines that allow managers to bridge professional divides and organizational boundaries in order to work together effectively, this is a new exploration of the challenges involved in today's global enterprises. The authors demonstrate that the work done in the modern organization is less and less about looking inward and creating strong teams inside the company and more about teaming across boundaries—that often are in flux. Extreme Teaming is a must-read book for all courses related to leading open innovation, teamwork and collaboration, project management, and cross-boundary work.

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Leadership; Complexity;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Edmondson, Amy C., and Jean-François Harvey. Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership. Emerald Group Publishing, 2017.

Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that’s a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others’ thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees’ vision to include more-distant networks. By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.

Article | Manufacturing & Service Operations Management | Spring 2019

Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations

Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson

To scale service operations requires retrieving knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository has the potential to help peripheral individuals gain access to valuable knowledge because it is universally available and can be used without social interaction. However, for it to successfully serve this equalizing function, those on the periphery of the organizational knowledge networks must actually use it, possibly overcoming barriers to doing so. In this paper, we develop a multilevel model of knowledge retrieval in teams to explore how individuals on the periphery of knowledge networks—because of their inexperience, location, lack of social capital, gender, or role—access knowledge from such a knowledge repository. Unexpectedly, we find that individuals whose experience and position already provide access to vital knowledge use a knowledge repository more frequently than individuals on the organizational periphery. We argue that this occurs because the knowledge repository—despite its appearance of equivalent accessibility—is actually more accessible to central than to peripheral players. Thus, knowledge retrieval is not driven primarily by the need to overcome limited access to other knowledge sources. Rather knowledge retrieval is facilitated when actors know how to reap value from the knowledge repository, which ironically improves with increasing access to other sources of knowledge. We conclude that a knowledge repository is unlikely to scale service operations without additional intervention.

Keywords: teaming; teams; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Management; Service Delivery; Knowledge Use and Leverage;

Citation:

Valentine, Melissa A., Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats, and Amy C. Edmondson. "Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations." Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 21, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 346–360. View Details

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Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership

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