Management practices that counteract teamwork
The ‘icide’ suffix indicates the killing of something, e.g. pesticide, the killing of pests, and homicide, the killing of a person. Tom DeMarco, in the context of a team, coined the term “Teamicide”. You can guess what it means.
DeMarco says:
Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible. Since coaching is essential to the workings of a healthy team, anything the manager does to increase competition within a team has to be viewed as teamicidal.
Listed below are a few management techniques that tend to produce teamicidal effects.
- Annual salary or merit reviews
- Management by objectives (MBO)
- Praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment
- Awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance
- Performance measurement in almost any form
And the irony…
Aren’t these the very things that managers spend much or even most of their time doing? Sadly, yes. And yet these actions are likely to be teamicidal.
Excerpts from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Third Edition. Tom DeMarco
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