Hackman's group effectiveness model

J. Richard Hackman is Cahners-Rabb Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University. He received his doctorate in social psychology from the University of Illinois, and then taught at Yale for twenty years. In 1986, he moved to his present position at Harvard. Hackman conducts research on a variety of topics in social and organizational psychology, including team dynamics and performance and the leadership of self-managing groups and organizations.

He is the author of numerous articles and seven books, the most recent being "Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances." Hackman received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association's division on industrial and organizational psychology, and both the Distinguished Educator Award and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Academy of Management.

Model
Research confirms that the presence of the five conditions--real team, compelling direction, enabling structure, supportive context, and competent coaching--enhances team performance effectiveness. In a study of 64 analytic teams in the U. S. intelligence community, for example, Hackman and O’Connor (2004) found that 74 percent of the variance on a reliable performance criterion was controlled by these conditions.

Research also has shown that the order of the conditions is important. In a study of self-managing field service teams, Wageman (2001) obtained independent assessments of each team’s design, the coaching behaviors of its leader, the team’s level of self management, and its objectively measured performance. Team design was four times as powerful as leader coaching in affecting a team's level of self-management, and almost 40 times as powerful in affecting team performance. Moreover, Wageman found that "good" coaching (such as helping a team develop a task-appropriate performance strategy) significantly helped well-designed teams exploit their favorable circumstances but made almost no difference for poorly designed teams. “Bad” coaching (such as identifying a team's problems and telling members exactly what they should do to fix them), by contrast, significantly compromised poorly designed teams' ability to manage themselves, worsening an already difficult situation--but did not much affect teams that were well designed. These findings confirm that even highly competent coaching cannot reverse the impact of a flawed team design (Hackman & Wageman, in press).