The five Ws

of team
communication
BY SARA MCCOMB, ALISON SCHROEDER, DEANNA KENNEDY AND RALITZA VOZDOLSKA

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A RY
Communication dramatically influences a team’s overall performance. With the
ever-increasing amount of communication media available, team members easily can become
overwhelmed and engage in inefficient, ineffective communication techniques. Our research provides
insights about who is responsible for team communication, what information must be communicated,
where it is best communicated, when it is most appropriately communicated and why this entire process
must be considered.

10 Industrial Management
Teams get their work done by communi-
cating. Twenty years ago, team members
communicated through meetings,
phone calls and voicemails. Fifteen
years ago, email was added to the list
of communication tools. Ten years
ago, more communication tools were
added, including voice-over-IP (e.g.,
Skype), net-meetings (e.g., Webex),
dashboards and wikis. Over the past
five years, social networking (e.g.,
LinkedIn) has increased, as well as the
use of virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life)
and cloud computing (e.g., Dropbox).
This expansion of technological options
has made communicating easier and
faster, but it also has increased the time
required each day to communicate. In
fact, some days so much time is spent
communicating that team members
have difficulty getting any real work
done.
Communication may lead to other
pitfalls, such as confusion, misdirection
or a lack of coordination. Yet rarely do
people spend time thinking about the
mechanics of communicating. The
human side of team communication
is in desperate need of consideration
to improve the effective and efficient
use of the plethora of communication
tools that are available. For more than
10 years, researchers have been working
to bring this issue to the forefront of
organizational decision makers and
team members. Studies have been
examining how team members commu-
nicate from many different angles. The
objective has been to understand how
communication manifests itself on
effective teams. These efforts have led
to some answers about the who, what,
where, when and why of team commu-
nication.
Who?
Exactly who is responsible for ensuring
appropriate team communication? The
answer is simple: Everyone. Whether
it is the team as a whole, the individual
team members, or even sources of
information external to the team,
everyone involved is responsible for
making cognizant decisions about
how communication occurs within
the team. If allowed to unfold in an
ad hoc, unstructured manner, team
communication may be inefficient and
lead to project delays and suboptimal
performance. Team members, therefore,
must be aware of what, where and when
to communicate information to achieve
effective and efficient outcomes.
At the team level, these questions
can be answered by thinking of
communication as a systematic process
involving each team member and each
relevant piece of information. The team
must develop a way for its members
to communicate the information
efficiently. This process might involve
eliciting knowledge on certain topics
from various team members or quieting
team members who have begun to
overpower the conversation with, for
instance, strong opinions or irrelevant
information.
It also could involve planning where
team activities will transpire, including
face-to-face team meetings, virtual team
meetings, or some combination of face-
to-face and virtual meetings among
subsets of team members. Finally, the
Rarely do team could benefit from facilitated
people spend interactions that mandate when specific
time thinking topics are discussed and issues are
about the resolved.
mechanics of At the individual level, members of
communicating. the team must be conscientious of their
personal contributions and obligations
to the what, where and when of team
communication. Thus, they must be
able to determine what information
is required to complete their tasks as
well as where and when to transmit
that information. Now turn to what
research has shown that might aid team
members as they fulfill their responsi-
bilities to communicate effectively and
efficiently.
What?
What information is necessary to
communicate with the team? Common
sense suggests that communicating all
information that might be relevant is
the best course of action. In that way,
everything anyone needs is available.
september/october 2012 11
 But this approach could be detri-
mental. Team members must remember
not to share too much or too little infor-
mation, but instead contribute to the
conversation with just the right content
and amount of information.
Everyone has experience with
teammates who send everything to
everyone to protect themselves from
future scrutiny if a problem arises.
Conversely, everyone can remember
that time where teammates were out
of touch and did not communicate
any information for extended periods.
While these behaviors are common-
place, neither strategy leads to efficient,
effective team communication.
Research has shown that team
communication follows an inverse,
curvilinear pattern, with the optimal
level somewhere in the middle. That
is, both too much and too little infor-
mation can hinder overall team perfor-
mance.
On the one hand, excess commu-
nication leads to overwhelming
amounts of information to sift through,
increasing the time spent reading and
processing information. The corre-
sponding delays can erode the team’s
performance. On the other hand, less
communication means that vital pieces
of information more likely will be
delayed or omitted, which also inhibits
the team’s performance.
Email is a perfect example of this
curvilinear pattern of team communi-
cation. When used correctly, it can be
an excellent medium for quick message
exchange. Email is stored automatically,
can be accessed at any time and is easy
to compose and send. However, this
ease of access can trigger overuse and
encourage team members to send all
available information to every possible
recipient rather than considering what
information is necessary and to whom
it should be sent. In other words,
email’s ease could lead to ineffective
communication.
Two insights from the research
underscore the importance of deter-
mining what information is dissemi-
nated among team members. First,
12 Industrial Management
too much information communicated
could be far more detrimental than too
little information. The research findings
suggest that teams can overcome a small
amount of missing information and still
achieve high levels of performance. The
converse, however, is not true because
exchanging exactly the information
necessary for task completion, or more,
may be troublesome. In fact, the perfor-
mance of teams in our study that over-
shared information was far worse than
the average performance for the entire
set of teams examined.
Second, the size of the team could
drive what information should be
shared. For example, a team of three can
achieve the same overall performance
as a team of 18, but only if the larger
team communicates half as much. This
difference results from the efficiency of
information sharing. Team members on
small teams must communicate more
information individually than members
of large teams in order for the team to
acquire all essential information. These
two insights underscore the need to
consider carefully what information is
made available to others and to ensure
that only essential information is shared.
Where?
With the ever-increasing number of
communication tools available, the
question arises, “Where should commu-
nication occur to be most efficient and
effective?” The simplest task, such as
setting up a team meeting, provides an
example of the alternatives that must be
considered for every team action. The
team leader could start an email thread
with the entire team that results in
multiple emails being exchanged before
confirming a meeting time and place.
The leader also could set up, for
instance, a Doodle poll, and then wait
for team members to respond with their
availability. Finally, a team member
could call teammates to set up a time
and place for a meeting. The best
solution for deciding where to commu-
nicate depends upon many factors. The
research findings show that geographic
location and the team’s tasks are two
such factors.
Most people consider face-to-face
interactions superior to virtual interac-
tions because they allow for additional
communication cues, such as hand
gestures and intonation, to augment
the words conveyed. As the business
world has gone global and more virtual
Too much communication options are intro-
information duced, however, team members often
communicated are geographically dispersed. These
could be geographically dispersed, or virtual,
far more teams are presumably at a disadvantage
detrimental when compared to teams that can meet
than too little in person because of varying levels of
information. familiarity among team members.
Indeed, team processes such as
decision making and conflict make
interacting virtually difficult for teams,
and these types of meetings often result
in low levels of member satisfaction
and team performance. The research
suggests that when teams are given the
initial opportunity to have a meaningful
face-to-face encounter, these difficulties
are overcome. Subsequent virtual activ-
ities result in performance comparable
to teams that are functioning face-to-
face throughout their lifecycle.
The key point here is that the first
face-to-face encounter must involve
real, substantive work, not just meet-
and-greet activities or information
distribution about the project the team
is being assembled to complete. Such
work provides the team members with
an opportunity to learn about their
teammates’ modes of operations and
personalities, important information
that can be recalled during future virtual
interactions.
Just because teams can meet face-to-
face does not mean that they should in
every case. The team’s tasks have some
influence on where communication
should transpire. Social psychologist
Joseph Edward McGrath describes four
types of tasks that teams may undertake
in his book Groups: Interaction and Perfor-
mance. Teams can negotiate, execute,
generate and choose. The negotiate and
execute tasks could benefit from face-
to-face interaction because nonverbal
cues can enhance the cognitive
consensus process required for negoti-
ating and the implicit coordination
that facilitates executing an activity.
Alternately, generating plans or options
to consider and choose among alterna-
tives can be accomplished best virtually
because virtual communication can
facilitate tangential, parsimonious
exchanges that are less subject to
censorship. The decision about where
communication will be transmitted
most effectively, therefore, can influence
a team’s success.
When?
When should discussions among
team members occur? The structure
and timing with which conversations
unfold can benefit the team’s work.
For instance, structured meetings
that follow planned agendas ensure
that all requisite topics get discussed.
Individual timing of information
sharing may be more difficult to
manage because determining when
information can be of value to others is
not always clear. Whether at the team or
individual level, carefully consider when
to communicate information.
Research findings have shown that
teams achieve high performance when
communication is structured and the
team members discuss topics in a
specific order. How many times have
you attended a project’s first meeting
and had someone say, “You do X,
she’ll do Y, I’ll do Z, and we’ll get back
together in two weeks to see where we
are”?
These assignments are intended to
expedite the process of completing the
project; however, they might not be
effective for a team. In fact, they could
slow the project as individual tasks
might require rework because team
members misunderstood goals. The
most successful teams in the studies
have started by developing a common
understanding of the parameters
governing their actions, such as their
budget, schedule and the external
support they have within the organi-
zation. These teams then discussed,
and agreed upon, the approach they
would use to address the task they had
been given. Once the team members had
a shared understanding of their param-
eters and their approach, they allocated
the individual tasks among themselves.
We also have been considering
the timing of information sharing to
identify when delaying communication
actually hinders the team’s overall perfor-
mance. For example, individual team
members may commit an error, be aware
of an emergent, albeit highly uncertain,
problem, or have data suggesting the
potential for an adverse event. Many
times, team members hide their diffi-
culties or insights while attempting to
solve the problem on their own and/
or monitor the evolving situation. This
tactic has its benefits as it does not
interrupt the other team members’ work
and allows the individual to grow and
learn.
If the team members cannot resolve
the issue by themselves, however, at a
point in time withholding this infor-
mation hinders the forward progress
of the team. Determining this point is
difficult, yet critical. We have found no
satisfactory answers to this issue yet, but
that does not mean that we all should
not be thinking about when to transmit
information so that it is most useful to
the team.
The timing of team communication
needs careful consideration. Much is
known already about planning and
running effective meetings and facili-
tating team-level communication. More
research is needed to help guide team
members as they decide when the
precarious balance between uncertainty
and expediency shifts, and commu-
nication is necessary to avoid adverse
events.
Why?
Why do we need to think about commu-
nication? Team members, presumably,
are assigned to teams because of specific
expertise they can bring to bear on the
team’s task. They also might have super-
fluous knowledge that could distract the
team. Whether considering activities at
the team or individual level, everyone
involved must be cognizant of their
unique and critical role in ongoing
communication. The ultimate goal must
be to convey the requisite information
via the most effective communication
channel available at a point in time
when it will be most useful. Using the
insights from our research gives teams
various strategies for enhancing team
communication to achieve their goals.
• Who? Everyone must be cognizant
of their role within the system of
team communication; teams need to
establish processes for team commu-
nication that best fit their work
environment and then facilitate and
support those processes until they are
By carefully embedded in the culture.
constructing • What? Team members must keep
communication in mind that less is more and that
exchanges, sending everything to everyone is not
teams the best strategy; it is not the quantity
can share of knowledge that a team possesses
information in that makes it successful but the
a manner that quality of what information is shared.
is effective and • Where? Team members must keep up
efficient. to date on the multitude of commu-
nication tools available to select the
best, most appropriate medium for
the task at hand.
• When? Team members need to
consider the timing of when infor-
mation is communicated to facilitate
team functioning and avoid adverse
events.
Teams get their work done by
communicating, but rarely are the
mechanics of the actual exchanges
considered. By carefully constructing
communication exchanges, teams
can share information in a manner
that is effective and efficient. More
importantly, the team members who
demonstrate respect for their fellow
teammates by providing them with the
information they need at the time when
it is most valuable have the opportunity
to enhance their team’s performance. v
september/october 2012 13
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