[MUSIC] If we have a situation which is complex, innovative and calls for solutions and agreement that nobody really knows, this is the prime situation of when you want a team, because with the different perspective and a diversity of opinions, you could come to a far better decision than you could when there's only one single decision maker. On the other hand, you can also say, well, these are people with a very strong, different personal focus on a specific area within the company with specific interests. So can we really expect them to work as a team as we expect from groups of people at lower levels of the organization? This is something which is out there in order for researchers to assess empirically and to get their heads around. So I just want to give you a bit more information on this topic of teamness, in order to see what we should advise for the board of GASGAS. So top team teamness, or we can also call it behavioral integration, as Hambrick introduced it to the literature, is really the question of, does your top team, your boards work as a team, or are maybe the individual members rather like lone wolves, each of the board members focusing on their own interests and their own perspectives in the company? So if we want to see what this teamness really is, researchers typically talk about three dimensions. The first is collaborative behavior. Are the board members working together in order to achieve common goals? The second is information exchange. Is information exchanged and discussed openly? Or are people using information in a way only strategically or politically very closely thinking about what information they reveal and whatnot, how this works together? So, with a more open exchange of information, and with more collaborative behavior, you would have a higher level of teamness in your top team. The third dimension then is joint decision making. This goes to the question of who is taking the decision? How is the structure of the decision making process? Often times, what we may see in a top team is that the CEO in the end is the one pulling the decision, pulling the strings. And the other board members may be there to give their opinion, their ideas. But in the end, it really is the CEO who decides. In other boards, or even in other management teams at lower level of the organization, there is a true sense of joint decision making. These are teams in which team members feel that when decisions are taken jointly, meaning that everybody should really agree and have a say in what the final decision is, these teams tend to favor, let's say, making a decision that everybody is in agreement with in order to facilitate the implementation of the decision afterwards. Because when everybody is really on board on whatever the decision is that is taken, the chances that these people will follow true and implement the decision with a higher level of effectiveness are, of course, much higher than in a situation in which one person is calling the shots. Any other people, well, they probably agree and they go with it. But if it's not really your own decision, you're hardly likely to exert as much effort in implementing the decision as you would when you also have been involved in the decision. And again, do management teams work as integrated teams with high collaborative behavior, open information exchange, and a joint decision making process? No, for sure not. Should a board function like this? Probably also not. Is it realistic to expect this? For sure not. But we do know from the literature is that top team, boards who work with a higher level of top team teamness, or behavioral integration, as researchers tend to call it, do achieve, in many situations, better financial results, and also have a positive impact on the employees in the organization. So if we think about GASGAS, if we think about the decision process that is about to happen in these boards, we can probably advice them to think very clearly about to what extent they want to be a team, and to what, and if they do so, how they can implement it and work together in order to achieve at a optimal decision. [MUSIC]
