78 Creating and Sustaining Commitment and Cobhesion Role conflict occurs when an individual perceives information regarding her job to be inconsistent or contradictory. For example, if manager X tells employee Y to perform task A, and then manager X’s boss tells employee Y to stop what she is doing and to perform task B, the employee is likely to experience role conflict. Role conflict can also occur when an indi- vidual’s own morals and values conflict with the organization’s mission or policies and proce- dures. For example, an environmentally minded advertising executive might find it difficult to accept a contract with a company that produces toxic or nuclear wastes as a side effect of its primary production of goods (Katz & Kahn, 1978). Team-building efforts that focus on clarifying roles help everyone in the work unit or work team understand what others expect. Later in this section, we will discuss how team- building techniques can help clarify roles. First, however, we discuss four roles that employees play in teams, each of which can facilitate or hinder team effectiveness. FOUR TEAM PLAYER STYLES Often, when people talk about the roles people play in groups and teams, they differentiate between task roles and group maintenance roles (Benne & Sheats, 1948; Dyer, 1995). In a task role, one’s behaviors are focused on what the team is to accomplish. Performing in a task role is sometimes referred to as having a task orientation, or being task oriented. In a group maintenance role, one’s behaviors are focused on how the team will accomplish its task. Performing in a group maintenance role is sometimes referred to as having a group mainte- nance, or process, orientation, or being process oriented. Because many maintenance activities focus on the team members and how they interact, some texts refer to people in those roles as being relationship oriented. More recently, Parker (2008) has proposed four roles, or team player styles: the com- municator, the contributor, the collaborator, and the challenger. Most often, people are most comfortable with one or two of these roles and will tend to emphasize the behaviors associated with these roles during team meetings. As team members take on these different roles, however, they can play the roles in a positive way that aids team effectiveness or in a negative way that hinders team effectiveness. Although Parker uses somewhat different terms from those in this book, these four roles match closely to the four quadrants of the competing values framework. Communicator Role. According to Parker, “The Communicator gives primary emphasis to team process . . . [and] believes there is an interpersonal ‘glue’ that must be present for the team to be effective” (p. 85). When working on a team, the communicator displays many of the competencies associated with the Collaborate (human relations) quadrant such as listening carefully to concerns of team members, providing feedback to team members, and helping resolve conflicts as they arise. Contributor Role. The Contributor is focused on problem solving and decision making and “sees his or her role as providing the group with the best possible information . . . freely offering all the relevant knowledge, skills, and data they possess” (p. 73). When working on a team, the contributor displays many of the competencies associated with the Control (internal process) quadrant such as setting high standards and insisting on high-quality outputs, ensur- ing that tasks are appropriately distributed across team members, and providing technical training for other team members.
