Working in a team

In 2026, GMAC asked 1,100 corporate recruiters what they value in business graduates. They ranked communication first, and problem-solving second. I therefore put more emphasis on those dimensions in your grade.

The same survey asked where graduates fall short. Fewer than half arrive well-prepared on grit, emotional intelligence, or managing people. All three are team skills.

So this page is not a nicety. It is a short toolkit, with sources, for the part of the course that most often goes wrong. The survey is here.

The four things that actually go wrong

The same four, in every capstone course.

  1. Nobody wrote down who does what. So the conscientious person does it all. By October they resent it.
  2. A deadline slips and nothing happens. No consequence was agreed. Nobody wants to be the one who raises it.
  3. The team never says the hard thing. The question is vague, or the data will not arrive. Saying so is uncomfortable, so nobody does.
  4. Everyone finds out in November that the work was split unevenly. By then it cannot be fixed.

Everything below is aimed at one of those four.

Tools worth using

The ground rules, and RACI

You write ground rules in meeting 2. Teams usually skip the split of work.

The standard tool is a RACI matrix. For each task, name who is Responsible (does it), Accountable (owns whether it happened), Consulted, and Informed. Accountable is always one person.

It sounds bureaucratic for a team of five. It takes fifteen minutes. It prevents failures 1 and 4, because every deliverable has a name against it.

The weekly check-in

Ten minutes at the start of every session B: what you did, what is stuck, who does what next. In writing, handed in.

This is a stand-up, borrowed from agile practice, and its purpose here is not ceremony — it is that the written record makes an uneven split visible in week 4 rather than week 13. See Derby & Larsen, Agile Retrospectives (2006), for the family of practices it belongs to.

The decision log

One shared document. Every time the team decides something — the question, the outcome variable, the data source — one line: what was decided, when, and why.

Costs nothing, and it is the single best defence against the November conversation that begins “I thought we agreed…”. It also becomes the spine of your work plan, because a decision log read backwards is a methods section.

Psychological safety

This is the best-evidenced finding in the whole area. Teams perform better when members believe they can be wrong out loud. Admitting you are lost has to be safe, or people stop admitting it. That is psychological safety, from Amy Edmondson’s work — “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly (1999), and her book The Fearless Organization (2018). Google’s internal Project Aristotle study found it the strongest predictor of team effectiveness among the factors it examined.

The practical version is one sentence. The person who says “I don’t understand what we’re doing” is doing the team a favour. Say that out loud in meeting 2. Then behave as if it is true.

Conflict, when it comes

Fisher & Ury, Getting to Yes (1981), is the standard reference, and its central move is the useful one here: argue about interests, not positions. “I want to use this dataset” is a position. “I want us to finish on time and I don’t trust the other source to arrive” is an interest, and interests can be traded.

Your ground rules should already say when a disagreement comes to me. Use it earlier than feels comfortable.

What we will use to assess it

Peer evaluation runs twice, at meetings 6 and 12, on CATME — the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness, developed at Purdue and used by around 17,000 instructors at 2,200 institutions. It scores five dimensions that research has found matter: contributing to the team’s work, interacting with teammates, keeping the team on track, expecting quality, and having the relevant knowledge and skills.

See Loughry, Ohland & Moore, “Development of a Theory-Based Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness”, Educational and Psychological Measurement (2007), and Ohland et al., “The Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness”, Academy of Management Learning & Education (2012). The tool itself is at info.catme.org.

Two things follow. Your rating of your teammates is not a formality — it adjusts individual grades on team work. And the five dimensions are published, so you know in advance what you are being rated on. Read them in week 1 and behave accordingly.

Frameworks you will hear about — and what they are worth

Business school will hand you several of these. They are not equally supported, and knowing which is which is itself part of the course.

Framework What it says What it is worth
Psychological safety (Edmondson) Teams do better when it is safe to be wrong out loud Strong. Extensively replicated, and the mechanism is clear
CATME dimensions (Ohland et al.) Five measurable facets of member effectiveness Strong. Validated instrument, large samples
Conditions for team effectiveness (Haas & Mortensen, HBR 2016) Compelling direction, strong structure, supportive context, shared mindset Good. Practitioner synthesis of a real literature
Tuckman’s stages — forming, storming, norming, performing (1965) Teams pass through predictable phases Useful vocabulary, weak evidence. Teams do not reliably move in that order. Use it to name what is happening, not to predict
Belbin team roles (1981) Nine roles; balance them Popular, poorly supported. The psychometrics have not held up well. Treat as a conversation starter, not a diagnosis

That last row is worth pausing on. A framework being widely used in business is not evidence that it works — which is the same lesson as the rest of this course, applied to management rather than to data.

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