Stage 4 – Commitment
How Will We Do It?
Stage four is the last stage of creating your virtual team. From here the team will move on to high performance in the sustaining mode. This stage is particularly important for interdependent teams as it clarifies individual team member roles, allocates resources, and defines how the team will make decisions. Stage four answers the question, “How will we do it?”
Stage four is the last stage of creating your virtual team. From here the team will move on to high performance in the sustaining mode. This stage is particularly important for interdependent teams as it clarifies individual team member roles, allocates resources, and defines how the team will make decisions. Stage four answers the question, “How will we do it?”
The goal for stage four is “commitment” by all team members and the team to the team goal, high-performance, and one another. Emerging from stage four with full commitment may require returning to earlier stages to re-examine goals or invest more time in building trust before stage four can be completed.
Identifying Roles
Team roles fall into two categories:
- Team function roles –related to group process and decision-making
- Team content roles – related to the project goals established in Stage 3
Team Function Roles. All of these roles are essential to effective team functioning. All roles will not be active at all times, but each contributes to effective group functioning in important ways at the appropriate time. Team members may play more than one role.
Team function roles fall into four categories: vision, task, expertise, and relationship oriented (Sibbet, 2011). CLICK ON THE TABLE BELOW OR HERE for more in-depth descriptions of each functional role.
Sources: Sibbet (2011), and Mumford, Van Iddekinge, Morgeson & Campion (2008).
Each team member has a personal style that prefers one or more of these functional roles, but these roles can be adopted and learned as well.
CLICK HERE for a self-assessment and exercise that can be used to understand how these roles are distributed among your teammates and which ones your team may need to intentionally adopt.
Team Content Roles. These roles are directly connected to the team goals established in Stage 3, identifying who is responsible for a goal, who has authority to approve resource decisions and expenditures, those who will be required to support the work or provide consultation, and finally who should be informed on progress toward goal achievement. These roles can be defined using a RASCI (responsibility, authority, support, consult, inform) chart, like this hypothetical example.
Team members
|
Goals
|
|||
Develop new customer
service interface
|
Develop, test, and
roll out internal user training
|
Develop & test supporting
IT infrastructure
|
Customer-facing
marketing/ communication
|
|
Celeste
|
R, A
|
A
|
A
|
A
|
Shawn
|
C
|
C
|
R
|
I
|
Roberta
|
I
|
R
|
I
|
I
|
Bob
|
S
|
C
|
S
|
I
|
Dawn
|
C
|
C
|
I
|
R
|
Noah
|
I
|
S
|
I
|
S
|
CLICK HERE for more information on RASCI charts and a RASCI chart activity for your virtual team.
Making Decisions
Teams make decisions via the interaction and collaboration between all these roles. As individual team members bring preferred decision-making styles to the team, it is important to proactively consider how your team will make decisions. CLICK HERE to access a self-assessment tool and team exercise for understanding team member decision-style preferences.
If Stage 4, Commitment, is unresolved...
If Stage 4, Commitment, is unresolved...
Key indicators that stage 4's core question, "How will we do it?" remains unresolved are:
- The team is overly dependent on a "leader" or another strong team member for guidance and/or approval.
- Individuals are generally resistant to direction to direction from other team members, or they fail to give meet commitments they have previously made.
CLICK HERE for guidance on team assessment and what to do when a stage's core question is unresolved.
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