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90 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

In particular, there is often a team leader who may have power to reward and
punish team members, for example, by being able to influence their appraisal or
promotion outcomes. In such situations, where there is personal risk involved in
disobeying the authority figure, conformity, groupthink or group polarization
may be very likely to occur. For example, Nadler, Hackman and Lawler (1979)
note that the quality of interpersonal relationships among group members in
real work settings often leaves much to be desired. They conclude that people
fall too readily into patterns of competitiveness, conflict and hostility, and that
only rarely do group members support and help one another.
Thus, teams (or projects) are not necessarily the organizational panacea that
they are sometimes presented as being for knowledge creation. Sinclair (1992)
goes as far as to say that the ideological assumptions of the prevailing team para-
digm are naïve, in particular because power has been treated as ‘a regrettable
and regressive tendency exercised by individuals who fail to identify with the
collective task’ (Sinclair, 1992, pp. 618–619). Thus, while there is a clear recog-
nition that political pressures exist within groups, the dominant response to this
is to seek to minimize this impact ‘through training and containing or banishing
power-seekers or by creating an organizational environment in which a spirit of
egalitarianism renders power and conflict irrelevant’ (Sinclair, 1992, p. 619).
In contrast to this view, Sinclair (1992) advocates treating individual power-
seeking within groups as endemic. Group behaviour from this view is seen as
essentially conflict between individuals seeking to exercise power in different ways
in order to advance their own individual ends. The outcome of team-work is, then,
the result of the successful assertion of some individuals’ power-seeking efforts
over others. Where consensus is achieved this simply conceals conflicts and power
discrepancies. This implies that groups with a clear and accepted distribution of
power are most likely to be judged as productive because the output of the group
conforms to expectations, even though the actual team-working effort may be
very limited, judged in terms of the level of knowledge exchanged, the quality of
group interactions, the level of creativity and so on. Indeed, from this perspective,
effective group work, which involves substantial levels of information exchange,
group interactions and creativity, actually depends on achieving some redistribu-
tion of power at least during team-working. Only with a redistribution of power
will conflict be allowed to emerge so that the false consensus (as with groupthink)
is eroded. In the Research Team case presented at the end of the chapter, these
issues of false consensus and the attempt to ignore conflict were very apparent.
Ironically perhaps, while the redistribution of power is central to the team-
working philosophy, in reality power becomes quickly formalized within team-
working situations and leads to high levels of team control and coercion over
individual members, even in the absence of an authority figure. Power is passed
from the hierarchy to the team members themselves, so that they become self-
managing teams. This power is used by the team members to police and control
each other’s behaviours. Barker (1993) demonstrated very vividly how a team
comes to use its power to increase control over individual team members. Barker
describes a manufacturing organization that changed from a system of bureau-

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