Effective Top Management Teams

James R. Barker (Department of Management US Air Force Academy, USA)

Journal of Organizational Change Management

ISSN: 0953-4814

Article publication date: 1 August 2002

502

Keywords

Citation

Barker, J.R. (2002), "Effective Top Management Teams", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 424-425. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2002.15.4.424.1

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited


If you are the JOCM reader who wants a detailed, well‐researched, readable, and prescriptive account of top management team building, then this is your book. Conversely, if you are the JOCM reader searching for a critical engagement of top management team activities and consequences, then you need to look elsewhere. The authors promise a thorough and innovative book on team building, and they certainly deliver. Effective Top Management Teams is about how to build successful executive teams – nothing more, nothing less.

Flood, MacCurtain and West have assembled an impressively comprehensive yet concise account of the intricacies of executive team building. I was particularly impressed with their ability to work through power issues in these teams. Their first chapter deals with the appropriateness of “top management teams” as a concept and helps us to see the difference between groupness and teamness and to understand the essential characteristics of and contexts necessary for executive teams.

Next comes a series of five chapters that explore these characteristics and contexts in detail, beginning with top team selection (Chapter 2). The reader will quickly notice the conceptual depth, practical orientation and attention to detail of the authors. These chapters are filled with figures and charts that summarize the key issues under discussion, making them readily accessible for the reader. The selection chapter covers identifying potential team members, figuring out who selects members, and working through fit issues such as personality and performance. Personally, I would have liked more on searching for complementary team skills, but the chapter is certainly comprehensive in identifying the issues that must be addressed in selection.

Chapter 3 addresses executive team building and takes a “FAQ sheet” approach by listing a series of questions with answers that cover key developmental issues. The reader will notice many tools, such as the “Team observation reflexivity rating sheet” that are at a higher level of sophistication than the tools we commonly see in today’s practitioner literature. Chapter 4 covers team leadership and with a focus on the common areas of leadership types, but adds several interesting turns on trust, motivation, and culture. I found the examples in this chapter to be particularly useful.

Chapter 5 is a very current but highly prescriptive discussion of team conflict. However, Chapter 6 really caught my interest with the authors’ discussion of power. I rather liked this chapter as the authors articulate power and power issues much better than common treatments. The chapter is conceptually first rate yet easy for the practitioner to understand. This chapter’s examples are especially useful. Chapter 7 is a summary that concludes with another quasi‐FAQ sheet‐like listing of key issues for teaming executives to consider.

I have two concerns with the book. The first is rather petty on my part, but I found the book to be much “Americanized.” Except for the occasional “s” instead of “z” and a few phrases such as “get on with” rather than “get along with,” the reader would have difficulty discerning the book’s European origin. I understand that the publisher desires Irish, British, and US audiences. And, I understand the authors’ concentration on the necessarily antiseptic prescriptions for top team success. But I miss that certain European flavor and flair found in such books as Tony Watson’s In Search of Management.

My second concern is more practical. Having worked in teams prior to becoming an academic, I believe that Flood, MacCurtain and West’s book is so comprehensive, prescriptive, and, yet, concise, that it would be overwhelming for the average top team member. The book has a lot of good material, but it is a lot of good material tightly packaged. Thus, I believe that the book will find its most valuable audience in consultants who are developing training programs for top management teams.

Flood, MacCurtain and West have delivered a well‐researched and accessible reference book on executive team development. The book is a highly prescriptive account, but that is what the authors promise – no more, no less. If such is what you want as a reader, then this book will certainly work for you. While no book could ever capture the necessary “art” of complementary personalities, natural social abilities, capacity for ambiguity, and sense of timing that separate the merely good teams from the highly functional teams, Flood, MacCurtain and West have captured just about all the current science available on building top management teams.

Related articles