Application of the S curve to determine the level of development of work teams

Abstract

Introduction: García, Rodríguez, Diaz, and Estrada (1988, p. 70) define the work team as “a highly organized social entity oriented towards the achievement of a common task” who recognize and value their "own functional roles" (Bejarano, 2019, p. 112). For Arrea (2016, p. 97), teamwork "is not an innate quality" and must be learned by applying rules. For Guerrero, Delgado. and Sánchez (2018), researchers and companies agree on the factors that promote teamwork. For their success, organizations need to base their operation on teamwork (Rojas, Jaimes and Valencia, 2018).

Beal, Bohlen and Raudabaugh (1964), Shein (1973) and Hersey and Blanchard (1986) define the maturity of a team as the level of development it is in, and it is a function of combining the competencies of its members (Guerrero et al., 2018), measured using a scale to establish the degree of maturity (Guiridkian and Cassanelli, 2010).

The S-curve, model functions that grow gradually at the beginning, accelerate in the middle of the period and end slowly, describes and predicts human, animal and product population growth (Aguilar et al., 2012 y Zartha et al., 2017)

Method: The present study is quantitative with a descriptive cross-sectional design, which worked with an incidental sample, made up of 32 work teams from 25 manufacturing companies in the city of Chihuahua, whose central inclusion criterion was belonging to the production department. The objective of the study was to graphically develop the development process followed by the work teams, applying the logistic growth curve, with the R(t) equation (Guerrero, 2006), using the group maturity variable (Montanari and Pilatti, 2014), along with over time, relative to the 9 factors established by the Integral and Dynamic Model, applying its measurement instrument (Guerrero, 2013), its justification arises from the fact of having a graphic representation that shows the development of team maturity as a function of the time.

Results: S curve was generated using the Group Maturity calculated values, by means of simple linear regression, to determine the time values, at the levels of the maturity scale. The location coefficients were determined, b = 82 and k = 0.26, and the percentages were defined for each development phase of the Integral and Dynamic Model, and their estimated times.

Discussion and conclusions: The plotted curve coincides with the curve proposed by Katzenbach and Smith (1995). Using the generated S-curve, percentages were established and limits were defined for each phase of the Integral and Dynamic Model that a work team must go through, as well as the estimated times it may take in each phase.