Among the findings of the study, the following were reported by participants:

1. 39 percent: Their supervisor failed to keep promises.
2. 37 percent: Their supervisor failed to give credit when due.
3. 31 percent: Their supervisor gave them the “silent treatment” in the past year.
4. 27 percent: Their supervisor made negative comments about them to other employees or managers.
5. 24 percent: Their supervisor invaded their privacy.
6. 23 percent: Their supervisor blames others to cover up mistakes or minimize embarrassment.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip. Four tips for employees who want to deal more effectively with a toxic boss:

1. Don’t take it personally. It’s difficult to understand how someone can be mean spirited, unprofessional, or even abusive. But if you try to understand your boss’s perspective it may help you cope with the behavior more effectively. And realize it’s not about you—people who are abusive are almost always that way with others, too.
2. Draw a line. When a behavior is clearly inappropriate or abusive, stand up for yourself. At some point, no job is worth being harassed or abused. And you may find standing up does not cost you your job—it has a good chance of ending, or at least reducing, the poor treatment.
3. Don’t sabotage. If you take revenge, you become part of the problem.
4. Be patient and take notes. We’re not suggesting a palace coup to unseat your boss—that strategy can go very wrong—but you may find it useful to have notes at your disposal should the boss shine the spotlight on you.

Teamwork takes more time and often more resources than individual work. Teams have increased communication demands, conflicts to manage, and meetings to run. So the benefits of using teams have to exceed the costs, and that’s not always the case.

How do you know whether the work of your group would be better done in teams? You can apply three tests to see whether a team fits your situation.

1. Ask yourself can the work be done better by more than one person? A good indicator is the complexity of the work and the need for different perspectives. Simple tasks that don’t require diverse input are probably better left to individuals.
2. Ask yourself does the work create a common purpose or set of goals for the people in the group that is more than the aggregate of individual goals? Many service departments of new-vehicle dealers have introduced teams that link customer-service people, mechanics, parts specialists, and sales representatives. Such teams can better manage collective responsibility for ensuring customer needs are properly met.
3. Determine whether the members of the group are interdependent. Using teams makes sense when there is interdependence between tasks—the success of the whole depends on the success of each one, and the success of each one depends on the success of the others. Soccer, for instance, is an obvious team sport. Success requires a great deal of coordination between interdependent players. Conversely, except possibly for relays, swim teams are not really teams. They’re groups of individuals performing individually, whose total performance is merely the aggregate summation of their individual performances.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: Before you rush to implement teams, carefully assess whether the work requires or will benefit from a collective effort.

Research on teams over thirty years has identified nine potential team roles. Successful work teams select people to play all these roles based on their skills and preferences—and on many teams, individuals will play multiple roles.

The nine team roles are:

1. Adviser – encourages the search for more information
2. Creator – initiates creative ideas
3. Promoter – champions ideas after they have been initiated
4. Assessor – offers insightful analysis of options
5. Organizer – provides structure
6. Producer – provides direction and follow through
7. Controller – examines details and enforces rules
8. Maintainer – fights external battles
9. Linker – coordinates and integrates the work of the other roles

So here is today’s daily HR Tip: To increase the likelihood the team members will work well together, managers need to understand the individual strengths each person can bring to a team, select members with their strengths in mind, and allocate work assignments that fit with members’ preferred personality, skills, and styles.

One of the most important findings about the size of a group concerns social loafing, the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than alone. It directly challenges the logic that the productivity of the group as a whole should at least equal the sum of the productivity of the individuals in that group. A common stereotype about groups is that team spirit enhances the group’s overall productivity. But that stereotype may be wrong. Experiments with individual and group performance on a rope-pulling exercise tells the tale (try it for yourself).

You would anticipate that three people pulling together on a rope should exert three times as much pull on the rope as one person, and eight people eight times as much. The research shows, however, that one person pulling on a rope alone exerts an average of 63 kilograms of force. In groups of three, the per-person force drops to 53 kilograms, and in groups of eight, it falls to only 31 kilograms per person.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: If you are problem solving or brain storming ideas, more group members is probably better than less. In fact, about 12 is ideal. If you want to get things accomplished, limit the team to six or seven people. This size of the team will probably act faster and put in more effort in to accomplishing the task.

• Their team colleague’s intentions are good—even when they disagree
• There is no reason to be protective or careful in what they say or do in the team setting
• They are comfortable being vulnerable with one another

If you spot team members engaging in the following behaviors you can probably bet that trust is low:

• Team members conceal mistakes and weaknesses
• They hesitate to ask for help
• They do not provide constructive feedback to each other
• They jump to conclusions about the motives of others
• They do not tap into other’s skills
• They hold grudges

The solution: address the root causes of low-trust through conducting meaningful team building sessions run by the team leader or a capable external facilitator. Left unchecked, low-trust teams will under perform, waste resources, and fail to deliver.

• Make sure there is a shared goal – make sure everyone on the team is in agreement with what they are trying to accomplish. This shared goal is important in helping team members make a commitment to see it through to the end. It is hard for people to be dedicated to a cause if they are unsure of what the cause actually is!
• Segment the end goal in to stages – in most cases, a goal will not be accomplished over night. Have the team break the project into several stages and work piecemeal to accomplish the larger goal. Achieving these smaller goals will act as a psychological “win” for the team and encourage them to complete the task at hand.
• Size matters – There are numerous theories out there about the number of employees needed for optimal performance on a team. Make sure that there are enough team members to carry the workload, but not too many that the group falls into discord (too many cooks in the kitchen). Somewhere between 5 and 9 people is a good rule of thumb.