02/19/20 – Fanglan Chen – In Search of the Dream Team: Temporally Constrained Multi-Armed Bandits for Identifying Effective Team Structures

Summary

Zhou et al.’s paper “In Search of the Dream Team” introduces DreamTeam — a system that identifies effective team structures for each group of individuals by suggesting different structures and evaluating the fit of each team. How team works relates with team structures, including roles, norms, and interaction patterns. Prior organizational behavior research doubts the existence of universally perfect structures. The rationale is simple: teams broast of great diversity so one single structure cannot satisfy the full functioning of each team. The proposed DreamTeam explores values along five dimensions of team structures including hierarchy, interaction patterns, norms of engagement, decision-making norms, and feedback norms. The system leverages feedback, randomly choosing metrics such as team performance or satisfaction, to iteratively identify the team structures that facilitate the best organization of each team. Also, the authors design multi-armed bandits with temporal constraints, an algorithm that determines the timing of exploration and exploitation trade-offs across multiple dimensions to avoid overwhelming teams with too many changes. In the experiments, DreamTeam is integrated with the chat platform Slack and achieves better performance and more diverse team structures compared with baseline methods.

Reflection

The authors design a system to facilitate the organization of virtual teams. Along with the several limitations mentioned in the paper, I feel the proposed DreamTeam system is based on a comparatively narrow scope of what makes a dream team and it seems difficult to generalize the framework to a variety of domains or platforms. 

In the first place, I do not agree that there is a universal approach to design or evaluate a so-called dream team. The components that make a dream team vary in different domains. For example, in sports, I would say personality and talent play important roles in forming a dream team. Actually, it goes beyond the term “forming” that a bunch of talented individuals not only bring technical expertise to the team, but they also contribute passion, strong work ethic, and strive for peak performance in the pursuit of excellence. To extend that point, working with people having similar personalities, similar values, similar pursuits will bring some chemistry to the team work which potentially enables challenging problem solving and strategic planning. All of these are not mentioned in the demensions and nearly impossible to be evaluated quantitatively. 

Also, I think it is important to make every team member understand their role, such as why they need to tackle the tasks and how that ties to a larger purpose beyond self’s needs. This provides a clear purpose and direction of where a group of people need to move forwards as a team. I do not think the authors emphasize the importance of how such understanding influences team member level of commitment. In addition, this kind of unified purpose can avoid duplication of member efforts and prevents pulling the efforts in multiple directions. 

Last but not least, in my opinion, basing on the maximizing of rewards is not the ideal way to determine the best team structures. Human society treasure process as well as results. It can be seen as a successful teamwork as long as the whole team is motivated and working on it. If too much emphasis is put on results, then the joy will be drained out of the job for the team. As long as progressive steps are made towards achieving the goal within a reasonable time frame, the team will become better. Building an ambitious, driven and passionate team is just the start. We need to ensure that the team members survive and are nurtured so that they can deliver on the targets.

Discussion

I think the following questions are worthy of further discussion.

• If you are the CEO of a company or a university president, would you consider using the proposed DreamTeam system to help organize your own team? Why or why not?
• Do you think the five bandits capture all dimensions to make a dream team?  
• Do you think the proposed DreamTeam system can be generalized to various domains? Are there any domains you think the system would not contribute towards an efficient team structure?
• Is there anything you can think about to improve the proposed DreamTeam system?