Influencing conditions for team effectiveness in corporate and investment banking

Abstract

Teams are at the centre of how work is accomplished by different types of businesses and industries. The study of teams and their effectiveness is likely to always be relevant as teams are dynamic. The external environmental factors influencing the contexts in which teams operate are not slowing down, directly influencing the ability of teams to remain effective. While the team effectiveness field is well researched, the research outcomes have been more static than dynamic necessitating for a continued understanding of teams. Using an already existing critical considerations framework this study explores conditions that influence team effectives in the CIB context. Firstly, the study explored how culture, composition and context in the CIB context influences team effectiveness. Secondly, the study explored the order for importance for the factors identified. Finally, the study explored if there were additional critical considerations relevant to the CIB context that had not already been identified by the framework. Data was collected through 14 in depth interviews across five teams in the CIB environment. Participant were made up of junior managers, senior managers and executives. Participants belonged to client facing teams (front office), operations teams (back office), control and risk management teams in order to gain a holistic in depth understanding of factors influencing team effectiveness in a CIB organisation. This case study method was utilised for the purposes of answering the research questions. The case study method makes it easy for the researcher to allow bias, furthermore, generalisation of findings may also be limited. To overcome these limitations, the researcher identified appropriate theory during the design phase. Furthermore, concepts were defined utilising reputable theory. In addition, the researcher selected client facing and non-client facing teams including control and risk functions to increase variability so that the findings may be generalisable. This study highlighted the importance of understanding the context in which team operates as context dictated the cultural and composition requirements in the CIB context. Furthermore, the study has established the level of significance for the selected CIB teams, the context dictates the composition and cultural elements and culture is more important than composition. In addition, this study has highlighted that leadership, organisational size and organisational structure are the most important contextual variables to enable team effectiveness for the investigated teams.