A team is a group of people who collaborate on related tasks toward a common goal.
Define teams, particularly as they pertain to the business environment or organizational workplace
- In a business setting most work is accomplished by teams of individuals. Because of this, it is important for employees to have the skills necessary to work effectively with others.
- Organizations use many kinds of teams, some of which are permanent and some of which are temporary.
- Teams are used to accomplish tasks that are too large or complex to be done by an individual or that require a diverse set of skills and expertise.
- team: A group of people working toward a common purpose.
The meaning of TEAM: A team is a group of people who work together toward a common goal. Sports teams are a good example of how teams work. For instance, a basketball team has individual players who each contribute toward the goal of winning a game. Similarly, in business settings most work is accomplished by teams of individuals who collaborate on activities with defined outcomes. Because teams are so prevalent in business organizations, it is important for employees to have the skills necessary to work effectively with others.
Organizations typically have many teams, and an individual is frequently a member of more than one team. Some teams are permanent and are responsible for ongoing activities. For instance, a team of nurses in a maternity ward provides medical services to new mothers. While patients come and go, the tasks involved in providing care remain stable. In other cases a team is formed for a temporary purpose: these are called project teams and have a defined beginning and end point linked to achieving a particular one-time goal.
Organizations form teams to accomplish tasks that are too large or complex for an individual to complete. Teams are also effective for work that requires different types of skills and expertise. For example, the development of new products involves understanding customer needs as well as how to design and build a product that will meet these needs. Accordingly, a new product-development team would include people with customer knowledge as well as designers and engineers.Teamwork involves a set of interdependent activities performed by individuals who collaborate toward a common goal.
Identify the processes and activities by which team work gets done
- Teamwork involves shared responsibility and collaboration toward a common outcome.
- Teamwork processes can be divided into three categories: the transition process, action processes, and interpersonal processes.
- Five characteristics of effective teamwork are shared values, mutual trust, inspiring vision, skills, and rewards.
- teamwork: The cooperative effort of a group of people seeking a common end.
- conflict resolution: Working to resolve different opinions in a team environment.
- conflict: Friction, disagreement, or discord arising between individuals or groups.
Teamwork: Human skill involves the ability to work effectively as a member of a group and to build cooperative effort in a team.
While the substance of the tasks involved in teamwork may vary from team to team, there are three processes that are common to how teamwork gets done: the transition process, action processes, and interpersonal processes. During each of these processes, specific sets of activities occur.1. The transition process is the phase during which a team is formed. Activities include:
- Mission analysis: establishing an understanding of the overall objective
- Goal specification: identifying and prioritizing the tasks and activities needed to achieve the mission
- Strategy formulation: developing a course of action to reach the goals and achieve the mission
2. Action processes comprise the phase during which a team performs its work. Activities include:
- Monitoring milestones and goals: tracking progress toward completion of tasks and activities
- Monitoring systems: tracking the use of resources such as people, technology, and information
- Coordination: organizing and managing the flow of team activities and tasks
- Team monitoring and support: assisting individuals with their tasks by, for example, providing feedback and coaching
3. Interpersonal processes include activities that occur during both the transition and action processes. These include:
- Conflict management: establishing conditions to avoid disagreement and resolving conflict when it occurs
- Motivation and confidence building: generating the willingness and ability of individuals to work together to achieve the mission
- Affect management: helping team members to regulate their emotions as they work together
- Shared values:a common set of beliefs and principles about how and why the team members will work together
- Mutual trust: confidence between team members that each puts the best interest of the team ahead of individual priorities
- Inspiring vision:a clear direction that motivates commitment to a collective effort
- Skill/talent:the combined abilities and expertise to accomplish the required tasks and work productively with others
- Rewards:recognition of achievement toward objectives and reinforcement of behavior that supports the team's work
By combining various employees into strategic groups, a team-based organization can create synergies through team processes.
Recognize the role of a team in an organization, and illustrate the team process.
- Due to global and technological factors, the importance of combining competencies and building strong teams is increasing.
- By combining resources (both across management levels and functional disciplines), organizations can create unique synergies and core competencies.
- Cross-functional teams utilize a wide variety of unique skill sets to build teams capable of achieving complex objectives.
- When carrying out a process in a team, it's important to set objectives and strategy, carry out objectives, and build strong interpersonal efficiency.
- synergy: The ability for a group to accomplish more together than they could accomplish individually.
- cross-functional teams: Teams with members that have diverse skill sets, enabling synergy across core competencies.
- Mission analysis
- Goal specification
- Strategy formulation
- Monitoring progress toward goals
- Systems monitoring
- Team monitoring and backup behavior
- Coordination
- Conflict management
- Motivation and confidence building
- Affect management
The Impact of Team Building: This chart allows you to visualize data from a study on team-building, and its impact on team performance. Building a strong organizational culture for successful teams requires commitment to team processes.
Depending on its needs and goals, a company can use a project team, a virtual team, or a cross-functional team.
Recognize the differences between types of teams and their uses
- An organization may use different types of teams depending on the work that needs to be accomplished to meet its goals.
- Common teams include project teams, virtual teams, and cross- functional teams.
- Project teams are created for a defined period of time to achieve a specific goal.
- Virtual teams have members who work in separate locations that are often geographically dispersed.
- Cross-functional teams bring together people with diverse expertise and knowledge from different departments or specialties.
- cross-functional team: A group of people from different departments in an organization working toward a common goal.
- Project teams are created for a defined period of time to achieve a specific goal. Members of a project team often belong to different functional groups and are chosen to participate in the team based on specific skills they can contribute to the project. Software development is most commonly done by project teams.
- Virtual teams have members located in different places, often geographically dispersed, who come together to achieve a specific purpose. Academic researchers often work on virtual teams with colleagues at other institutions.
- Cross-functional teams combine people from different areas, such as marketing and engineering, to solve a problem or achieve a goal. Healthcare services are frequently delivered by interdisciplinary teams of nurses, doctors, and other medical specialists.
The benefits of teamwork include increased efficiency, the ability to focus different minds on the same problem, and mutual support.
Identify the sources of benefits teamwork creates
- When a team works well together as a unit they are able to accomplish more than the individual members can do alone.
- Teamwork creates higher quality outcomes that are more efficient, thoughtful, and effective, as well as faster.
- Individuals benefit from teamwork through mutual support and a great sense of accomplishment.
- diverse: Consisting of many different elements; various.
- efficiency: The extent to which a resource, such as electricity, is used for the intended purpose; the ratio of useful work to energy expended.
- Higher efficiency: Since teams combine the efforts of individuals, they can accomplish more than an individual working alone.
- Faster speed: Because teams draw on the efforts of many contributors, they can often complete tasks and activities in less time.
- More thoughtful ideas: Each person who works on a problem or set of tasks may bring different information and knowledge to bear, which can result in solutions and approaches an individual would not have identified.
- Greater effectiveness: When people coordinate their efforts, they can divide up roles and tasks to more thoroughly address an issue. For example, in hospital settings teamwork has been found to increase patient safety more than when only individual efforts are made to avoid mishaps.
- Mutual support: Because team members can rely on other people with shared goals, they can receive assistance and encouragement as they work on tasks. Such support can encourage people to achieve goals they may not have had the confidence to have reached on their own.
- Greater sense of accomplishment: When members of a team collaborate and take collective responsibility for outcomes, they can feel a greater sense of accomplishment when they achieve a goal they could not have achieved if they had worked by themselves.
Teams face challenges to effective collaboration and achieving their goals.
Identify the common pitfalls teams can encounter that limit their performance
- The social aspect of collaborative work makes teams vulnerable to pitfalls that can hurt performance.
- Common pitfalls involve poor group dynamics such as weak norms, lack of trust, and interpersonal conflict.
- Poor team-design choices such as size, skill sets, and assignment of roles can negatively affect a team's ability to complete tasks.
- groupthink: A process of reasoning or decision making by a group, especially one characterized by uncritical acceptance of or conformity to a perceived majority view.
All teams are groups of individuals, but not all groups are teams.
Differentiate between a group and a team
- A group is two or more individuals who share common interests or characteristics and whose members identify with each other due to similar traits.
- Teams and groups differ in five key ways: task orientation, purpose, interdependence, formal structure, and familiarity among members.
- team: Any group of people involved in the same activity, especially referring to sports and work.
- group: A number of things or persons that have some relationship to one another. A subset of a culture or of a society.
- Task orientation: Teams require coordination of tasks and activities to achieve a shared aim. Groups do not need to focus on specific outcomes or a common purpose.
- Degree of interdependence: Team members are interdependent since they bring to bear a set of resources to produce a common outcome. Individuals in a group can be entirely disconnected from one another and not rely on fellow members at all.
- Purpose: Teams are formed for a particular reason and can be short- or long-lived. Groups can exist as a matter of fact; for example, a group can be comprised of people of the same race or ethnic background.
- Degree of formal structure: Team members' individual roles and duties are specified and their ways of working together are defined. Groups are generally much more informal; roles do not need to be assigned and norms of behavior do not need to develop.
- Familiarity among members: Team members are aware of the set of people they collaborate with, since they interact to complete tasks and activities. Members of a group may have personal relationships or they may have little knowledge of each other and no interactions whatsoever.