Good points
That made me think as follows:
Perhaps we need to get to the 'essence' first, then consider size, structure, longevity, and so on.
Maybe we should also be careful to distinguish between teams and groups. A team is a fom of group. A group is not necessarily a team. This may help bound the construct of teams.
So, perhaps an institution/organisation/team is determined and differentiated by its purpose in combination with other factors?
So, a team would by bounded by a time limited purpose and the size and structures would be determined by that purpose? Thus we could suggest that a team has a specific objective it has to achieve. It has a delimited mission. This mission is time bound - to achieve X within time frame Y. The team's purpose may be bound by other and/or additional constraints and objectives.
We have then to consider this against, for example, Baseball where the 'team' may be long lived - or is it. If all the players in the team are replaced over a period of time is it the same team? Thus it may be that a team may only derive an existence within the constraints of either an organisation (a baseball 'team' where the organisation (the club or business), or nstitution, is taken into account.
We could also challenge this with your example of an R&D team - but we can test this by checking if the R&D team is bound by objectives, projects, and so on with sufficient constraints to define it as a team - otherwise it may an R&D division/section which has teams within it.
However, we couldn't have a 'team' without the organisation or institutional boundaries - and the attendant resources and constraints. We could of course have a 'group' without these constraints.
An organisation is probably not time limited by default (of course we will have exceptions of organisations set up that are purpose specific and time limited, but this is probably not common and we may be able to develop further explanations for these sorts of special purpose vehicles.) Thus short lived organisations are, generally speaking, failures, accidents, fatalities, and so on. We could also consider the assumed consensus that an organisation does have an accepted purpose - it converts inputs into outputs (and we can consensually bound the inputs and outputs to avoid too much drift).
There is a sense in which we could argue that an organisation is 'just a big team', and a team is just 'a small organisation'. But we can go back to purpose and intention and see if we can confirm the purpose relative to temporal boundaries. We could also look at things like stability and replacement and so on: team members are replaced more frequently and are more purposefully intradependent than are members of organisations; an organisation's purpose and raison d'etre remains consistent over time - in principle - while that of a team changes over time. Even a baseball team my change it's purpose over time, even rapidly perhaps, depending on whether it is winning or losing.
An insitution may be not-time-limited by design. That is, institutions do not consider themselves to be time limited and do not restrict themselves by time. The stated purpose of an insitution is maintain a position of beliefs and values over time. It does not convert inputs to outputs.
If there is a team which has neither organisational nor institutional linkages, and is not a material manifestation of either an organisiation or an insitution, and is not purposefully linked to, and constrained by, the organisaiton and/or institution, that would, of course, present a serious challenge to this line of thought? On the other hand, we could simply say, that is a group, not a team, and thereby eliminate that particular challenge.
Regarding size, we could also consider that up to a point - critical mass - an organisation could be a team and a team could be an organisation. A 3-person start up will probably have to work as a team to get the organisation off the ground. Once the organisation has established itself it may be that those three people no longer work as a team (at least not all the time).
Also, I did look up the dictionary defintions but they are not really any help here.
RE
>>>>>>>>>>
I think it's function: I wouldn't pick institution as the third group,
but rather industry.
>>>>>>>>>>
I think these points are well made. I suggested Institution... particularly because of its ramifications in organisational theory and the existing strenght of this construct (some of the time).
I am wary of defining things by function, although I know this is common practice in other areas. For example, in the practice of healthcare function is predominant. Taking function as the starting point, however, seems to me to risk being too exclusionary. For example, if we accept that we can organisations by recognised universal process - they convert inputs into outputs (which we could of course argue is precisely function!!!; or, we could argue it is process rather than function, which is the understanding presented here) - we can define and develop a consensual construct of organisations (as has arguably already been done...). We could look at what is neccessary and sufficient to include/exclude in this.
If an organisation is big, it will probably have an HR department attached...and so on. If it is small it won't. I think we would need to find a way of including the concept of function and what its boundaries are within this. We can then question the function/s of the organisation rather than defining an organisation by function.
Whether or not an organisation is a group will depend on the particular bounded viewpoint we wish to take. If we are describing and constrcuturalising an organisation as 'an entity' or a 'body' then it is not, by definition, a group. The organisation will subsume the group but will not 'be' the group? (posed as questions, not answers).
Defining an organisation as a group probably lacks the necessary complexity of an organisation. Of course, a small organisation, as argued above, could be a group, and a team. At some point the organisation becomes more than a group and the group more than/differentiated from a team. In particular, a group need not have the same level of focussed common purpose and temporal constraints that are imposed on a team. This could be worked through using the Baseball team as the exemplar to challenge the thinking as the Baseball team exists long past the usual temporal constraints for a team - but then we can apply the Theseus's ship argument: if the majority of players on a baseball team have been replaced with new players is it still the same team? (We could equally apply this question to the recent approach used to manage the England Football team in the World Cup)
In terms of driving on the right being institutionalised, i think that is a good point. However, I would think of it as follow: Driving on the right as a concept has become part of the institution in Canada that contains driving, among other things. Driving on the right is not an institution per se.
I wonder if industry is already well established as a construct with businesses as the next level down. That is, industry is to institution as business is to organisation. However, industry may be a weak construct when we consider public services, and may lack the necessary components of beliefs and values which are potentially important for defining organisations - althought that may be hard to see if we consider organisations as bodies that convert inputs to outputs. But, if we consider that organisations form groups within institutional fields then we can see that the impact of institutional beliefs and values are important for organisations and help bound and define organisations as members of that institution (or as members of a number of institutions).
>>> "Bing Ran" <
bur12@psu.edu> 29/06/2010 13:21 >>>
Thank you William for your thoughts. I like this thought experiment, but
wonder whether there is a critical mass (a core, a central essence, a
distinctiveness) for each concept.
Moreover, is there one direction continuum (for example, most people will
think size-wise and feel team should be smaller than organization)that
distinguish these three concepts?
Easy to find the invalidity of this: we will call a 3-people start-up as an
organization, but we also might call a large R&D of 40 people as a group. If
"size" could not be used to distinguish these concepts, could it be
structure (i.e., organization has more layers than team)? We could notice
that 3-people start-up really has no more structural layers than a 40-people
R&D group. Then if not size, not structure, could it be time (team has
shorter life than organization) - but we could easy to find many short-lived
organizations and much longer lived groups.
Best,
Bing
-----Original Message-----
From: William Fear [mailto:
fearwj@Cardiff.ac.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 4:51 AM
To:
OMT@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU; Bing Ran
Subject: Re: [OMT] intrinsic differences between TEAM and ORGANIZATION
RE:
>>> Bing Ran <
bur12@PSU.EDU> 24/06/2010 01:21 >>>
**Apologies for Cross-Posting**
I'm interested at your thoughts on the intrinsic differences between TEAM
and ORGANIZATION, or some pointers on the literature discussing the
conceptual differences. I will gladly compile responses and send back to the
listserv.
>>>>>>>
I think this is a really interesting question. Could I suggest expanding it
to consider the differences between:
Institution
Organisation
Team
My starting point would, I guess, be temporal continuity combined with some
level of critical mass.
I think I would also want to include the thought experiment of Theseus's
ship: simply put, if, over time, all the parts of Theseus's ship are
replaced with new parts, let's say they are like for like, then is it still
the same ship? I'd extend this to: if the parts are replaced with parts
that are the same or similar in function but not wholly like for like - a
different type of wood, a different type of sail, say - then is it still the
same ship? At what point does it become a different ship? This may apply
differentially to institutions, organisations, and teams which may start to
give some boundaries for the constructs.