The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a business book by consultant and speaker Patrick Lencioni first published in 2002. It describes the many pitfalls that teams face as they seek to "grow together". This book explores the fundamental causes of organizational politics and team failure. Like most of Lencioni's books, the bulk of it is written as a business fable. This book has appeared on American best-seller lists including: The New York Times Best Seller List, Business Week, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. The issues it describes were considered especially important to team sports. The book's lessons were applied by several coaches to their teams in the National Football League in the United States.
Summary
According to the book, the five dysfunctions are:
Absence of trust—unwilling to be vulnerable within the group
Fear of conflict—seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
Lack of commitment—feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization
Avoidance of accountability—ducking the responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards
Inattention to results—focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success
Characters
Kathryn Petersen, newly appointed Chief Executive Officer of fictional company DecisionTech, Inc.
Gordon Curphy and Robert Hogan, both organizational psychologists and leadership researchers, provide a critical perspective on Lencioni's team model in their book The Rocket Model: Practical Advice for Building High Performing Teams. While they clearly emphasize The Five Dysfunctions of a Team's contributions to the field they also point out major drawbacks of the model: "Lencioni's model provides useful insights about team dynamics and has some advantages over the other models. The model is straightforward, identifies many of the reasons why teams fail, and offers practical advice on how to build high-functioning teams. Lencioni also deserves credit for pointing out the following:
The importance of the "first team".
The need for leaders to teach teams how to win.
The recognition of time wasted avoiding conflict.
Cascading effect of leadership team dynamics.
The simplicity of the Five Dysfunctions model and key insights make it popular among human resource professionals and team consultants. Nonetheless, Lencioni's book is explicitly a work of fiction; it is not based on research and its practical recommendations lack empirical support. For example, when the trust level among team members is low, Lencioni recommends that leaders put them through a series of personal disclosures. However, there is little likelihood that these activities can build trust in dysfunctional work teams. According to Katzenbach and Smith, the only effective method for teams to build trust and cohesion is to do real work, and using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the results do not constitute real work. Similar problems afflict the four other dysfunctions."
