Team Work

WHY TEAM POPULAR

In the modern business concept, teams have experienced substantial popularity to run their business smoothly and efficiently. The popularity of teams is as follows:

a) As organizations have restructured themselves to compete more effectively and efficiently, they have turned to teams as a better way to use employee talents. b) Management has found that teams are more flexible and responsive to changing events than traditional departments or other forms of permanent groupings. c) Teams have the capability to quickly assemble, deploy, refocus, and disband. d) Teams facilitate employee participation in operating decisions. e) Teams can develop new skills and become more involved in their jobs. So, they are an effective means for management to democratize their organizations and increase employee motivation.

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DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TEAMS AND GROUPS

Groups and teams are not the same things. Here we will try to clarify the differences between a work group and a work team.

A work group is a group that interacts primarily to share information and to make decisions to help each member perform within his or her area of responsibility. Work groups have no need or opportunity to engage in collective work that requires joint effort. There is no positive synergy that would create an overall level of performance that is greater than the sum of the inputs.

A work team generates positive synergy through coordinated effort. Their individual efforts result in a level of performance that is greater than the sum of those individual inputs.

The comparison of work groups and work teams can be summarized as under:

Work Groups	Criteria	Work Teams
Share information	Goal	Collective performance
Neutral (sometimes negative)	Synergy	Positive
Individual	Accountability	Individual and mutual
Random and varied	Skills	Complimentary

TYPES OF TEAMS

The four most common types of teams are likely to be found in an organization. They are:

1. Problem-solving teams: In problem-solving teams, members share ideas or offer suggestions on how work processes and methods can be improved, although they rarely have the authority to unilaterally implement any of their suggested actions. These are typically the same department who meet for a few hours each week to discuss ways of improving quality, efficiency, and the work environment.

2. Self-managed work teams: Self-managed work teams are groups of employees who perform highly related or interdependent jobs and take on many of the job responsibilities of their former supervisors. Typically, these include planning and scheduling of work, assigning tasks to members, collective control over the pace of work, making operating decisions, taking action on problems, and working with suppliers and customers.

3. Cross-functional teams: These are made up of employees from about the same hierarchical level but from different work areas who come together to accomplish a task. A task force is essentially a cross-functional team. Similarly, committees composed of members from across departmental lines are another example of cross-functional teams. Cross-functional teams are an effective means for allowing people from diverse areas within an organization to exchange information, develop new ideas, solve problems, and coordinate complex projects.

4. Virtual teams: The previous types of teams do their work face-to-face. Virtual teams use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members to achieve a common goal. They allow people to collaborate online – using communication links like wide-area networks, video conferencing, or e-mail – whether they’re only a room away or continents apart.

CREATING EFFECTIVE TEAMS

The key components making up effective teams can be subsumed into four general categories. These are:

1. Context: The four contextual factors that appear to be most significantly related to team performance are:

a) Adequate resources: Teams are part of a larger organizational system. All work teams rely on resources outside the group to sustain them. A scarcity of resources directly reduces the ability of a team to perform its job effectively. Teams need timely information, proper equipment, adequate staffing, encouragement, and administrative assistance.

b) Leadership and structure: Team members must agree on who is to do what and ensure that all members contribute equally to sharing the workload. Agreeing on the specifics of work and how they fit together to integrate individual skills requires team leadership and structure.

c) Climate of trust: Interpersonal trust among team members facilitates cooperation, reduces the need to monitor each other’s behavior, and bonds members around the belief that others on the team won’t take advantage of them. Team members are more likely to take risks and expose vulnerabilities when they believe they can trust others on their team.

d) Performance evaluation and reward system: Individually oriented evaluation and reward systems must be modified to reflect team performance. In addition to evaluating and rewarding employees for their individual contributions, management should consider group-based appraisals, gain-sharing, profit-sharing, small-group incentives, and other system modifications that will reinforce team effort and commitment.

2. Composition: This category includes variables that relate to how teams should be staffed. These variables are:

a) Abilities of members: To perform effectively, a team requires three different types of skills. These are technical expertise, problem-solving and decision-making skills, and interpersonal skills.

b) Personality: Teams that rate higher in mean levels of extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability tend to receive higher managerial ratings for team performance. A single team member who lacks a minimum level of, say, agreeableness, can negatively affect the whole team’s performance.

c) Allocating roles: Managers tend to understand the individual strengths that each person can bring to a team, select members with their strengths in mind, and allocate work assignments that fit with members’ preferred styles.

d) Diversity: When a team is diverse in terms of personality, gender, age, education, functional specialization, and experience, there is an increased probability that the team will possess the needed characteristics to complete the task effectively.

e) Size of teams: A minimum of four or five and a maximum of ten may be necessary to develop diversity of views and skills. Managers seem to seriously underestimate how coordination problems can geometrically increase as team members are added.

f) Member flexibility: Teams made up of flexible individuals have members who can complete each other’s tasks. This is an obvious plus to a team because it greatly improves its adaptability and makes it less reliant on any single member.

g) Member preferences: Not every employee is a team player. High-performing teams are likely to be composed of people who prefer working as part of a group.

3. Work design: Effective teams need to work together and take collective responsibility to complete significant tasks. The work design category includes the following:

a) Authority: Team authority means the freedom and autonomy of the members of the team.

b) Skill variety: Team members must have the opportunity to use their different talents and skills.

c) Task identity: Team members must have the ability to complete a whole and identifiable task or product.

d) Task significance: When working on a task or project, the team members must have a substantial impact on others.

4. Process: The final category related to team effectiveness is process variables. These include the following:

a) Common purpose: Effective teams have a common and meaningful purpose that provides direction, momentum, and commitment for members. This purpose is a vision. It’s broader than specific goals.

b) Specific goals: Successful teams translate their common purpose into specific, measurable, and realistic performance goals. Team goals should be challenging.

c) Team efficacy: Effective teams have confidence in themselves. They believe they can succeed. We call this team efficacy.

d) Conflict levels: Conflict in a team isn’t necessarily bad. Conflict can actually improve team effectiveness, although not all types of conflict. Effective teams will be characterized by an appropriate level of conflict.

e) Social loafing: Individuals can hide inside a group. They can engage in social loafing and coast on the group’s effort because their individual contributions cannot be identified. Effective teams undermine this tendency by holding themselves accountable at both the individual and team levels.

TURNING INDIVIDUALS INTO TEAM PLAYERS

The following summarizes the primary options managers have for trying to turn individuals into team players:

1. Selection: Some people already possess the interpersonal skills to be effective team players. When hiring team members, in addition to the technical skills required for filling the job, care should be taken to ensure that candidates can fulfill their team roles as well as the technical requirements.

2. Training: A large proportion of people raised on the importance of individual accomplishments can be trained to become team players. Training specialists conduct exercises that allow employees to experience the satisfaction that teamwork can provide. They typically offer workshops to help employees improve their problem-solving, communication, negotiation, conflict-management, and coaching skills.

3. Rewards: Promotion, pay raises, and other forms of recognition should be given to individuals for how effective they are as collaborative team members. Examples of behavior that should be rewarded include training new colleagues, sharing information with teammates, helping to resolve team conflicts, and mastering new skills that the team needs but in which it is deficient. Lastly, team members should be given the intrinsic rewards that employees can receive from teamwork. It is exciting and satisfying to be an integral part of a successful team.