2017年06月四级第3套长篇阅读匹配原文翻译及答案

A) Teams have become the basic building blocks of organizations. Recruitment advertisements routinely call for "team players". Business schools grade their students in part on their performance in group projects. Office managers knock down walls to encourage team building. Teams are as old as civilization, of course: even Jesus had 12 co-workers. But a new report by Deloitte, "Global Human Capital Trends", based on a survey of more than 7,000 executives in over 130 countries, suggests that the fashion for teamwork has reached a new high. Almost half of those surveyed said their companies were either in the middle of restructuring or about to embark on (开始) it; and for the most part, restructuring meant putting more emphasis on teams.

团队已成为组织的基本构建单元。招聘广告中惯常要求应聘者具备‘团队合作精神’。商学院会在一定程度上根据学生在小组项目中的表现来评定成绩。办公室管理者通过拆除隔墙来鼓励团队建设。当然，团队自文明之初便已存在：即便是耶稣也有十二位门徒。然而，德勤基于对超过130个国家7000多位高管的调查得出的《全球人力资本趋势》新报告指出，团队合作的风尚已达到新的高度。近半数受访者表示，其公司正处于重组进程之中或即将启动重组；而重组在很大程度上意味着将更加强调团队的作用。

B) Companies are abandoning conventional functional departments and organising employees into cross-disciplinary teams that focus on particular products, problems or customers. These teams are gaining more power to run their own affairs. They are also spending more time working with each other rather than reporting upwards. Deloitte argues that a new organisational form is on the rise: a network of teams is replacing the conventional hierarchy (等级体制).

企业正在摒弃传统的职能部门架构，转而将员工组织成专注于特定产品、问题或客户的跨学科团队。这些团队在管理自身事务方面获得更多权力。他们也花费更多时间相互协作，而非向上级汇报。德勤认为，一种新的组织形式正在兴起：一个团队网络正在取代传统的等级体制。

C) The fashion for teams is driven by a sense that the old way of organising people is too rigid for both the modern marketplace and the expectations of employees. Technological innovation places greater value on agility (灵活性). John Chambers, chairman of Cisco Systems Inc., a worldwide leader in electronics products, says that "we compete against market transitions (过渡), not competitors. Product transitions used to take five or seven years; now they take one or two." Digital technology also makes it easier for people to co-ordinate their activities without resorting to hierarchy. The "millennials" (千禧一代) who will soon make up half the workforce in rich countries were raised from nursery school onwards to work in groups.

团队风尚的推动力源于一种认知：传统的人力组织方式对于现代市场及员工期望而言过于僵化。技术创新更加重视灵活性。全球电子产品的领军企业思科系统公司董事长约翰·钱伯斯表示：‘我们是在与市场过渡期竞争，而非与竞争对手竞争。产品过渡期过去需要五到七年，如今则只需一两年。’数字技术也使得人们更容易协调彼此的活动，无需依赖等级制度。即将构成富裕国家劳动力半数的‘千禧一代’，从幼儿园起便被培养进行团队合作。

D) The fashion for teams is also spreading from the usual corporate suspects (such as GE and IBM) to some more unusual ones. The Cleveland Clinic, a hospital operator, has reorganised its medical staff into teams to focus on particular treatment areas; consultants, nurses and others collaborate closely instead of being separated by speciality (专业) and rank. The US Army has gone the same way. In his book, "Team of Teams' General Stanley McChrystal describes how the army's hierarchical structure hindered its operations during the early stages of the Iraq war. His solution was to learn something from the insurgents it was fighting: decentralise authority to self-organising teams.

团队风尚的浪潮也从通常的企业代表（如通用电气和IBM）蔓延到了一些不那么寻常的机构。医院运营商克利夫兰诊所已将其医务人员重组为团队，专注于特定的治疗领域；顾问、护士及其他人员密切协作，而非按专业和等级分隔开。美国陆军也走了同样的道路。斯坦利·麦克里斯特尔将军在《赋能》一书中描述了陆军等级森严的结构如何在伊拉克战争初期阻碍了其行动。他的解决方案是从与之交战的叛乱分子身上学习：将权力下放给自我组织的团队。

E) A good rule of thumb is that as soon as generals and hospital administrators jump on a management bandwagon, it is time to ask questions. Leigh Thompson of Kellogg School of Management in Illinois warns that, 'Teams are not always the answer—teams may provide insight, creativity and knowledge in a way that a person working independently cannot; but teamwork may also lead to confusion, delay and poor decision-making." The late Richard Hackman of Harvard University once argued, "I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary... But don't count on it."

一个可靠的经验法则是，一旦将军们和医院管理者们也开始追赶某种管理潮流，就该提出质疑了。伊利诺伊州凯洛格管理学院的莉·汤普森警告说：‘团队并非万能之策——团队可能以独立工作者无法提供的方式贡献洞察力、创造力和知识；但团队合作也可能导致混乱、延误和糟糕的决策。’哈佛大学的已故教授理查德·哈克曼曾指出：‘我毫不怀疑，当拥有一个团队时，存在其创造奇迹、产出非凡成果的可能性……但别指望它。’

F) Hackman (who died in 2013) noted that teams are hampered by problems of co-ordination and motivation that chip away at the benefits of collaboration. High-flyers forced to work in teams may be undervalued and free-riders empowered. Groupthink may be unavoidable. In a study of 120 teams of senior executives, he discovered that less than 10% of their supposed members agreed on who exactly was on the team. If it is hard enough to define a team's membership, agreeing on its purpose is harder still.

哈克曼（于2013年去世）指出，团队受到协调和激励问题的困扰，这些问题会削弱协作的效益。被迫在团队中工作的明星员工可能被低估，而搭便车者则可能被赋权。群体思维或许难以避免。在一项针对120个高级管理团队的研究中，他发现，不到10%的所谓团队成员就团队究竟由哪些人组成达成一致。如果连定义团队成员都如此困难，那么就团队目标达成共识则更是难上加难。

G) Profound changes in the workforce are making teams trickier to manage. Teams work best if their members have a strong common culture. This is hard to achieve when, as is now the case in many big firms, a large proportion of staff are temporary contractors. Teamwork improves with time: America's National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the incidents in its civil-aviation database occurred on a crew's first day of flying together. However, as Amy Edmondson of Harvard points out, organisations increasingly use "team" as a verb rather than a noun: they form teams for specific purposes and then quickly disband them.

劳动力层面的深刻变化使得团队管理变得更加棘手。团队成员拥有强烈共同文化时，团队运作最为有效。然而，当大型企业中有很大一部分员工是临时承包商时（如今许多大公司正是如此），这便很难实现。团队合作会随着时间而改善：美国国家运输安全委员会发现，其民航数据库中73%的事故发生在机组人员首日共同飞行时。然而，正如哈佛大学的艾米·埃德蒙森所指出的，组织越来越多地将‘团队’用作动词而非名词：他们为特定目的组建团队，随后又迅速解散它们。

H) The least that can be concluded from this research is that companies need to think harder about managing teams. They need to rid their minds of sentimentalism (感情用事): the most successful teams have leaders who are able to set an overall direction and take immediate action. They need to keep teams small and focused: giving in to pressure to be more "inclusive" is a guarantee of dysfunction. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's boss, says that "If I see more than two pizzas for lunch, the team is too big." They need to immunize teams against group-think: Hackman argued that the best ones contain "deviants" (离经叛道者) who are willing to do something that maybe upsetting to others.

从这项研究中至少可以得出结论，企业需要更认真地思考团队管理问题。他们需要摒弃感情用事的想法：最成功的团队拥有能够设定总体方向并采取即时行动的领导者。他们需要保持团队小而专注：屈服于追求更‘包容’的压力是团队功能失调的保证。亚马逊老板杰夫·贝索斯说：‘如果午餐需要超过两个披萨，那团队就太大了。’他们需要使团队具备对群体思维的免疫力：哈克曼认为，最优秀的团队包含‘离经叛道者’，即那些愿意做可能令他人不快之事的成员。

I) A new study of 12,000 workers in 17 countries by Steelcase, a furniture-maker which also does consulting, finds that the best way to ensure employees are "engaged" is to give them more control over where and how they do their work―which may mean liberating them from having to do everything in collaboration with others.

兼营咨询业务的家具制造商世楷对17个国家12000名员工的一项新研究发现，确保员工‘敬业’的最佳方式是赋予他们更多关于工作地点和工作方式的自主权——这可能意味着将他们从必须与他人协作完成所有任务的状态中解放出来。

J) However, organisations need to learn something bigger than how to manage teams better: they need to be in the habit of asking themselves whether teams are the best tools for the job. Team building skills are in short supply: Deloitte reports that only 12% of the executives they contacted feel they understand the way people work together in networks and only 21% feel confident in their ability to build cross-functional teams. Loosely managed teams can become hotbeds of distraction―employees routinely complain that they can't get their work done because they are forced to spend too much time in meetings or compelled to work in noisy offices. Even in the age of open-plan offices and social networks some work is best left to the individual.

然而，组织需要领悟比如何更好地管理团队更重要的道理：他们需要养成习惯，自问团队是否是完成工作的最佳工具。团队建设技能供不应求：德勤报告称，他们联系的高管中仅有12%认为自己理解网络中人们的工作方式，仅有21%对构建跨职能团队的能力有信心。管理松散的团队可能成为干扰的温床——员工常常抱怨无法完成工作，因为他们被迫花太多时间开会或被迫在嘈杂的办公室工作。即使在开放式办公室和社交网络时代，某些工作最好留给个人完成。