Engaging Team Interventions: A Complexity Approach to Organizational Development and Change

The purpose of the paper is to examine how organizational development and change (ODC) consultants engage in complex processes of facilitating and implementing team interventions in organizational contexts. Organizational teams depict a variety of types such as work teams, parallel teams, project teams, and management teams [17]. Team interventions are used to support team-building processes and training strategies toward improving team performance and organizational effectiveness. The notion of high-performing teams in organizational contexts needs to be reexamined and reinterpreted beyond team building, developmental, and training strategies. Complexity issues such as organizational cultural and political realities impact teams and teamwork effectiveness or lack of it. The qualitative methodology integrates ODC methodologies in examining the challenges and opportunities experienced in facilitating change related to tasks and roles required in the diagnosis and implementation of team intervention. The case study of team intervention in a business school depicted capacity improvements in team building and training outcomes which demonstrated its success. Ten members from the Career Development Centre (CDC) were selected for this study. The research techniques included personal interviews, focus group discussions, and observations with members of the team. However, the organizational cultural, and political factors remained the team’s challenge. Since these complexities were not solved the team eventually collapsed. Engaging team interventions in organizations requires moving beyond analyzing internal group dynamics of task and maintenance functions of teams identified within team training and team building strategies.