6.3 Team performance and team satisfaction

Looking back over a four month period of teamwork that was exclusively online, this is what one course participant wrote:

Considering my initial joy in being able to use this teamwork to bond with my new colleagues, I can say that this goal was achieved. Although we never had the chance to meet and get to know each other in a familiar face-to-face setting, it is remarkable how we managed to build a trust and a foundation for a deeper connection. All in all, I feel very good about our team. We started as strangers, became team members with a common goal and ended up being friends. Despite all the difficulties or precisely because of them, from my point of view we achieved our objective and I feel confident that we did a good job and that it will be evaluated as such.

Source: Learning journal, 2020

Apart from showing that virtual teamwork can be a very positive experience, the quote highlights several things. One is the obvious positive link between team satisfaction and performance. The other aspect relates to performance or the output itself which is obviously understood as ‘achieving a goal’ and ‘doing this successfully’. However, saying that ‘I feel confident that we did a good job’ also tells us that performance relates to an evaluation of the output and that this is linked to standards the team itself set as well as those who evaluate the output.

Effectiveness can therefore be understood as the ratio of input and output relative to the defined goal or expectation related to the team’s task. This, however, is a fairly vague statement and is difficult to measure since the measurements employed very much depend on the type of teamwork and the task. For example, the productivity of a team whose task involves a lot of creativity and experimentation, for example the development of a new product, is much more difficult to measure than, say, the output of a production team.

Equally difficult to measure is the influence of team satisfaction on team performance. According to the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Lexico, 2020), satisfaction is the "fulfilment of one's wishes, expectations, or needs, or the pleasure derived from this". We can, however, argue that team satisfaction is a key factor that drives motivation and performance. When one team member is not happy, he or she is likely to be unfocussed, postpone tasks, and be less willing to deal with any challenges at hand. And when one team member performs poorly, this will influence the other team members' output. As a result, their productivity will decline, ending in a vicious circle. Being attentive to team satisfaction by analysing and dealing with the challenges at hand, is therefore vital to the ultimate output of the team.