National culture: differences in teams
Stumble It!Can you spot which of these three international software teams is the bioteam?
Fortune Magazine, November 28, 2005 reports on research by Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School on teams of software engineers in India, China and Hungary. But which of the three teams was most like a bioteam?
The Indian Team
The engineers reached out directly to the other specialists on their team anytime they had problems. The sense of mutual commitment however led to very long hours as everyone felt they had to always be available to their colleagues.
The Chinese Team
All requests for help had to be channelled through the project leader which made them a bottleneck for the whole team. When the leader was not there none of the issues could be progressed directly by the team members.
The Hungarian Team
When a software engineer had a problem they would just go directly to whoever happened to be free at the time.
Which of the three teams was most like a bioteam
Perlow observed:
- The Indian approach leads to team member burnout
- The Chinese approach puts the boss in sole control of progress
- Only the Hungarian approach allows the team members to be in control of their own destiny
The Hungarian approach resonates best with the key principles of bioteaming such as:
- Every member is a leader
- Whole team communications and transparency
- Personal 'win-wins' for all team members not just the leader
- Contingency against 'single leader bottleneck'
Which of the three team is closest to how your organisation's teams operate?
To download the latest version of the bioteams manifesto click here.
Digg | 
del.icio.us | 
Reddit | 
Yahoo! | 
Add to my favourites
Bioteams Books Reviews
Leadership under pressure: the two worst mistakes
I have been thinking a lot about what happens when a leader gets under severe pressure, usually because things are not going according to plan. It seems to me this is the very essence of real leadership and where leaders can really justify their salaries. BUT according to Professor Dietrich Dorner, in his excellent book The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations, there are two very tempting but ultimately disastrous tangents a leader can pursue in a crisis instead of addressing the real issues.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Related Virtual Software Development Articles
Can software engineering teams adapt biological principles
Ken Thompson, facilitated an interactive session at the 2006 SPICE Conference in Luxembourg in June 2006 with the leading practitioners and researchers in Software Process Improvement (SPI) on the topic 'Can software engineering teams adapt biological principles?'
Virtual software development services: a review
In a previous article, Avoiding remote software collaboration disasters, I shared my mixed experiences of virtual software development and offered four golden rules I now use. I mentioned elance but have now also been favourably impressed with another service, Rentacoder, which allows you to post projects to be bid for by software contractors all over the world.
Success secrets of Open Source project teams
Open Source Software (OSS) Development Projects use bioteaming
I attach a 2-page article by Brian Teeman, Roles and responsibilites of users and community members in an open source project.
Leave a comment