Answer & Explanation:Identify
your assigned article as quantitative or qualitative and support your
assertion with an analysis of three defining characteristics.Describe, and critique the theoretical framework using the “Use of Theory Checklist” as a guide.Analyze at least one assumption in your assigned article.Please see attachment for ARTICLE B: USING CRITICAL PRAXIS TOUNDERSTAND AND TEACH TEAMWORKusing_critical_praxis_to_understand_and_teach_teamwork.pdf
using_critical_praxis_to_understand_and_teach_teamwork.pdf
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USING CRITICAL PRAXIS TO
UNDERSTAND AND TEACH TEAMWORK
David R. Seibold
Paul Kang
University of California, Santa Barbara
The authors pursue three aims in this article. The first is to underscore critical praxis as
an especially valuable approach to understanding and enabling teamwork. The second
is to offer four dimensions of teamwork—vision, roles, processes, and relationships—
as salient areas to interrogate using critical praxis. The third aim is to consider the
implications and methods for teaching teamwork in the classroom context. In the process
of doing so, the authors highlight limitations of prevailing theoretical approaches and
note changes in their own practice of teaching and facilitating teamwork that have
occurred through a commitment to critical praxis.
Keywords:
critical praxis; teams; business communication pedagogy
PEOPLE CONTINUALLY ARE told the importance of teamwork.
From elementary school to graduate education and professional
training, teachers, coaches, and consultants laud team structures and
teamwork processes as the panacea for challenges to coordination
and constraints on cooperation (LeFasto & Larson, 2001; MacMillan,
2001). Yet potential and actual team members frequently cringe at
the mention of teamwork (Bacon & Blyton, 2005), which they associate with lengthy, inefficient, emotionally draining experiences that
they endure with fake smiles and hope to escape without offending
others (Keyton & Frey, 2002). If the virtues of teamwork are taught
in so many institutional settings, why team members’ abhorrence of
teams in situ?
We believe there is a lack of alignment between what is taught
about teamwork and what transpires within teams. First, conventional
management and business communication pedagogy tends to view
Authors’ Note: The authors wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Business Communication Quarterly, Volume 71, Number 4, December 2008 421-438
DOI: 10.1177/1080569908325859
© 2008 by the Association for Business Communication
421
422
BUSINESS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / December 2008
teamwork (as with other instructional topics) within the constraining
lenses of its traditions, methodologies, and theories (Grey, 2004).
The limiting scope of each lens restricts what can be viewed and
imposes accepted practices. Second, because conventional management and business communication pedagogy reifies its own traditions, it may overlook or derogate aspects of teamwork phenomena
that do not align well with its perspective (Grey, 2004). The consequences of these two dynamics are that conventional pedagogy misconstrues or massages what is taught and/or neglects some elements
that may prove to be relevant to the investigation or instruction. In
either case, should learning about teamwork remain primarily within
the confines of that tradition, the chasm between education and real
workplace contexts and dynamics (e.g., teams and teamwork) will
indeed be unfathomable (Grey, 2004).
To reconcile this disconnection, we follow a different path—one
that forefronts questions and reflection rather than conventions and
solutions. We propose analyzing and teaching teamwork through
critical praxis, a process involving a continuous relationship between
practice and reflexivity (Pedlar, 2005; Revans, 1982, 1998). Critical
praxis as applied to teamwork enables (a) continuous questioning,
including evaluating teamwork processes and structures from inception to adjournment; (b) identifying and managing values and real
issues that surface as a result of teamwork practice; (c) establishing
the value of team members’ concerns as well as contributions; and
thus (d) creating a bona fide teamwork experience. With the latter,
we mean to say that critical praxis not only facilitates the teamwork
process, but that the practice of using a method from critical pedagogy is in itself a process that has the potential to illuminate and to
promote teamwork.
In addition to suggesting the use of critical praxis for teamwork, we
offer possible areas—dimensions (Seibold, 2005)—of teams as salient
when considering teamwork. We propose that the defining qualities of
teams with teamwork, as distinct from other types of groups, as well
as team structures in which members have not achieved teamwork, are
grounded in interactions that produce unique features along four
dimensions: (a) vision, (b) roles, (c) processes, and (d) relationships.
These dimensions may serve as where to investigate using the critical
praxis approach and how to facilitate/teach teamwork, and they may
Seibold, Kang / CRITICAL PRAXIS AND TEAMWORK
423
assist in discovering and understanding embedded values within teamwork. Stated differently, because these four dimensions are closely
associated with the defining characteristics of teamwork, they are
especially salient areas to examine for embedded values.
Hence, we pursue three aims in the following sections. The first is
to underscore critical praxis as a valuable approach not only to
understand teamwork, but also to enable teamwork.
We begin by briefly reviewing teams and teamwork as examples of
what often is taught concerning them. We then consider the utility of
critical praxis for understanding and redressing challenges to teamwork and for teaching and learning about teamwork. Our second
objective is to highlight four dimensions of teamwork—vision, roles,
processes, and relationships (Seibold, 1995)—as salient areas to investigate using critical praxis. Critical praxis provides the “how to investigate” teamwork, and the four dimensions direct attention as to “where
to investigate.” We provide an extended example—a case involving
support staff of a human services municipal agency involved in
improving their own teamwork—to illustrate not only the process and
results of examining the four dimensions of teamwork through the use
of critical reflexive practice, but also shifts in thinking about what
constitutes teamwork by both team members and their facilitator. Our
third goal is to consider implications and methods for teaching teamwork in the classroom context that flow from discussion in the first
two arenas and from the case example.
TEAMS AND TEAMWORK
Teams are specific types of formal groups of persons who are
members of an organization or its immediate environment (e.g., partner, stakeholder, or supply chain organizations) and who possess
complementary characteristics, share a common goal, and are mutually accountable for their performance (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993).
Teams tend to persist over time and over multiple tasks and so
members develop shared history (Arrow, McGrath, & Berhdahl,
2000). Although educators find value in teaching these defining
attributes of teams for purposes of comparison with other organizational structures (Devine, Clayton, Philips, Dunford, & Melner,
1999), they do little to illuminate the process(es) of teamwork, nor
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BUSINESS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / December 2008
to enable members to develop it, nor especially to evaluate whether
and how they wish to do so.
Organizational groups and teams with teamwork are those in
which members (a) share and can articulate a team vision; (b) have
defined and valued role expectations that they accept; (c) enjoy considerable role-related autonomy; (d) set high standards for themselves
and are self-disciplined; (e) develop a structure that is responsive to
environmental demands, yet appropriate for the organization and its
environment; (f) conduct significant types and portions of decision
making within the team (rather than having decisions made by others
outside the team or atop it); (g) share leadership to some extent and/or
have a formal team leader who empowers members and works to
secure resources that the team needs to excel; (h) freely share information and interpretations with each other; (i) acknowledge and reinforce others members’ contributions and support; and (j) convey and
display mutual respect and trust with one another (Hackman, 1990;
Seibold, 2005; Seibold, Kang, Gailliard, & Jahn, in press). Again,
helping members understand and appreciate these qualities of teamwork is useful theoretically, but they have little immediate utility for
how members do or do not achieve teamwork.
CRITICAL APPROACH TO
UNDERSTANDING TEAMWORK
The predominant approach to redressing teamwork problems is to
suggest that managers and team members themselves acquire alternate tools/strategies to foster teamwork: If problem A arises, use solution B. If solution B does not work, use the alternate solution C. If
both B and C fail, then wait until solution D is tested and verified.
This seems to have been the philosophy of conventional development/training (Fisher, Rayner, & Belgard, 1995; Harrington-Mackin,
1994; Hitchcock & Willard, 1995). This is not to say that the foregoing approach is necessarily ineffective or always so, but that the rationale and solutions addressing some problematic issue(s) of teamwork
may be embedded with their own set of potential problematic issues:
that solution B may have its own set of potential problems, or that the
combination of B and A creates a situation E, or both. Although the
implementation of a new strategy may relieve the problematic
Seibold, Kang / CRITICAL PRAXIS AND TEAMWORK
425
issue(s) at hand, it also may trigger new difficulties. Traditional pedagogy would offer another slew of strategies for such contingencies.
As mentioned earlier, this cyclic process of problems and solutions
reifies the nature and presumed value of conventional pedagogy.
Management and business communication educators strive for a
plethora of teamwork “strategies” with which to equip their students
for use in the “real world.” And in entrenching this learning approach,
conventional pedagogy establishes itself as the fountainhead.
A less obvious approach may be to do what conventional pedagogy
hesitates to do: to reflect upon or problematize the rationale or the solution (e.g., Grey, Knights, & Willmott, 1996). Critical scholars remind
us that all social structures tacitly or explicitly espouse political and
moral values (Grey, 2004). Therefore, when team members embrace
and enact philosophies, strategies, and plans without understanding the
embedded values, they knowingly and unknowingly empower these
value-laden structures and processes and legitimatize their meaning
within the socially shared reality. And the root cause of the problematic
issue may have stemmed from the very values associated with the
“strategy” enacted to facilitate, say, teamwork in the first place.
When the dominant approach to implementing teams and teaching teamwork processes is problematized, there is the potential to
acknowledge and unveil the embedded political, ethical, and philosophical values and to emancipate both learning and practice
(e.g., Alvesson & Deetz, 2000; Grey, 2004) related to teamwork.
Moreover, adopting a reflexive praxis may provide an insightful
“sense of the context and the associated rules for meaning and action”
and, thus, enable how to act in a given situation (Barge, 2004, p. 78).
In addition to discovering problematic issues and values, reflexive
praxis provides each person a validated voice and perspective in
addressing the discovered issues and in participating to cocreate a
shared structure and process. The last feature is especially salient for
understanding and teaching teamwork.
Critical scholars have offered many alternatives to enable this learning process (e.g., action learning, dialogue, de-centering, experiential
learning, reflexivity) that emphasize less “the right answers” and more
in-depth inquiry and understanding (Cunliffe, 2004; Grey, 2004; Grey
et al., 1996; Holmes, Cockburn-Wootten, Motion, Zorn, & Roper,
2005; Pedlar, 2005; Revans, 1982, 1998). For example, Holmes and
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BUSINESS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / December 2008
colleagues (2005) reported a case in which using praxis led to critical
reflection on alternatives and to creative new directions for public
relations practice. They also discussed an instance of using dialogue
that led to a greater understanding of cultural expression and suppression and how experiences and beliefs can be socially constructed.
Importantly, these experiences accomplish other functions: They
empower all members to view their realities as having significance;
members develop respect for others’ ideas and perspectives as having
equal value; and subsequent discussions encourage the creation of
ideas that address the needs of multiple realities. All of these are
especially relevant for teamwork, which requires cocreation and
coproduction as means to form and address goals. In this sense, the
underlying aims of teamwork and critical pedagogy are parallel and
often converge.
TEAMWORK: FOUR DIMENSIONS
Supporting a perspective such as critical praxis, then advocating a
focus on certain elements of teamwork, may seem contradictory. After
all, when teachers emphasize where to look, while endorsing “reflect
and problematize,” they could undermine the latter. Should team
members have the freedom and security to propose other problematic
areas rather than be directed to focus on these dimensions? Does this
empower certain perspectives while diminishing the value of others?
We note that dialogue and learning should not remain within the confines of these four dimensions, of course; all voices have value, and all
perspectives should be respected and carefully considered. We offer
these four dimensions as having “possibilities” for educators, facilitators, and members because, in our experience, teamwork dynamics
often develop along these four dimensions. Most important, they offer
value-laden perspectives about which team members can reflect and,
perhaps, against which they can react.
Both in how they are attained and how they are manifested, the 10
qualities of teamwork enumerated above enable members’ actions
and encourage members’ reflexivity along four dimensions: vision,
roles, processes, and relationships. The distinguishing features of
teamwork thus are the reasons for the manifestation of these four
dimensions. The stream of member actions, enacted more or less
skillfully and with varying levels of awareness and reflection (Poole,
Seibold, Kang / CRITICAL PRAXIS AND TEAMWORK
427
Seibold, & McPhee, 1996) and enabling the creation of teamwork in
groups/teams, in turn re-creates teamwork as a social structure discernible to themselves and others (and, in the process, becomes a
source of admiration to all, as in “What a team!”). And because the
four dimensions are rooted in the distinguishing characteristics of
teamwork, then problematizing those dimensions as potential sites
of embedded values also may facilitate the process of discovering
more about teamwork and how members appropriate resources that
enable teamwork. We turn to those dimensions next, and then offer
a case example that proffers the utility of critical praxis in teaching
teamwork, which we discuss in the last section.
Groups and teams have goals, which typically are determined and
demanded by managers atop the unit or its formal leader. However,
groups or teams with high levels of teamwork are distinguished by
the vision that members themselves foster and embrace. Vision
involves not only members’ desired end state (i.e., their goals and
objectives), but also how the process of envisioning those ends, and
the result of attaining them, recursively affect the development of
that unit and its unity, as well as the team’s identity (for members
and for outsiders).
Members of work groups have jobs: the formal duties associated with
their assigned, defined position in the unit. However, members of groups
or teams characterized by high levels of teamwork also have roles that
may be more or less than their jobs. Team leaders, for example, usually
share their formal job duties through empowering other members and
through semiautonomous team processes (while they assume leadership
responsibility for activities outside the team, e.g., resource gathering,
advocacy, boundary spanning). Conversely, team members typically
enact behaviors and functions that are more than their formal jobs:
assisting others as needed, assuming responsibilities that are beyond
their job descriptions, and providing needed informal functions necessary to maintaining team cohesiveness and ensuring task locomotion.
Role-related dynamics leading to and re-creating teamwork fundamentally entail whether and how each member comes to understand what
other members expect of him or her.
Work units possess, indeed are characterized by, the operations
and procedures that structure members and enable group performance
and goal achievement. However, in units in which members attain
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BUSINESS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / December 2008
strong teamwork with each other, these foundational task processes
that must be developed to ensure successful task accomplishment
and to sustain teamwork tend to be generated by the members themselves. Processes in teams are more flexible and responsive to the
changing needs in the team, and challenges from its environment,
than “standard operating procedures” implemented in top-down
fashion by managers. Furthermore, in groups and teams that achieve
high levels of teamwork, there are sufficient resources (financial,
personnel, technological, and material) to sustain teamwork, as well
as rewards, training, and information systems that enable and facilitate members’ strong teamwork (Hackman, 1990).
Finally, members of any group interact with each other directly
and indirectly (through leaders and others in the team and by using
multiple channels that vary in their richness). Members of groups
or teams evidencing teamwork attain qualitatively different—and
better—interactions with each other, which in turn foster stronger
interpersonal relationships between team members than between
members of units in which teamwork is not evident. The relationships dimension of teamwork refers to interaction between members
characterized by respectful and open sharing of information, by
perspective-taking and valuing difference, and by allowing for constructive communication of disagreement. Though seemingly less
central to task achievement and therefore often ignored, the dynamics that lead to effective member relationships are intrinsic to
teamwork in groups and teams.
As noted earlier, these dimensions—vision, roles, processes, and
relationships between team members—reflect areas of significant
member action and interaction that create and recreate teamwork.
However, teaching members simply to appreciate these dimensions
of teamwork does little to help them put those dimensions into action
or even to question whether they wish to do so. Nor does this determine the validity of those dimensions from members’ experience.
Problematizing the dimensions as potential sites of embedded values
has the potential to illuminate how members assay teamwork and
embrace or resist it. When wedded with a critical praxis perspective
and members’ adoption of that stance, there is the potential to see
teamwork develop in how members discuss and approach/avoid
teamwork ideals along the four dimensions. We offer a case example
Seibold, Kang / CRITICAL PRAXIS AND TEAMWORK
429
next and conclude with implications and methods for teaching teamwork in management and business communication classes.
CRITICAL PRAXIS, TEAMWORK DIMENSIONS, AND
TEAMWORK DEVELOPMENT: A CASE EXAMPLE
Context and Team: An Overview
At the request of agency administrators, members of a team of attorneys and a team of information systems professionals in a human
services municipal agency had been working with the first author to
improve processes and performance within their respective teams.
Three representatives of a total of 12 support …
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