Teamwork and Team Building Chapter 9 PDF

Chapter 9 Team Work and Team Building A. Teamwork: Team is two or more people with complementary skills join together to work interactively as a single unit to achieve a common purpose for which they hold collective accountability. Team members share information and work without delineating boundar...

Chapter 9 Team Work and Team Building A. Teamwork: Team is two or more people with complementary skills join together to work interactively as a single unit to achieve a common purpose for which they hold collective accountability. Team members share information and work without delineating boundaries of jobs. There is no missing or overlapping of any activity. Group vs Team:  Skills: People join groups voluntarily without selection and may possess same skills. Teams are selected on basis of skill requirement for a purpose and members have complementary skills.  Contribution: In groups, individuals contribute and it is coordinated with a planned structure. In teams, members contribute collectively like a single individual performing the task.  Accountability: Group activity is delineated into roles and individual is accountable for his task. Team members perform tasks in a coordinated approach and have joint accountability.  Commitment: Group members commit individually to respective roles. Team members work in collaboration and commit jointly.  Responsive to demands: Group members respond to management’s demands. Team members respond to self-imposed demands.  Interaction to achieve goals: Group members share information and then work individually. .  Impact of synergy: Team activity results in synergy and hence higher performance. B. Types of Teams  Work Teams: They are designed with specific purpose and concerned with primary organizational activities and goals.  High performance Teams: Members are highly committed to each others’ personal development and career success. They are empowered to make decisions and share responsibility.  Improvement Teams: They concentrate on improvement of existing systems of the organization.  Semiautonomous work Teams: They have right to make certain decisions and implement them without referring to top management.  Self-managed and directed Teams: They are autonomous in decision making and implementation.  Cross-functional Teams: They are formed with employees at same hierarchical level but different functional areas. They are formed to formulate strategies and integrated decisions that have impact on various departments of the organization.  Loose Teams: They are like ad hoc teams, they are used in independent routine work and assembly lines.  Collaborative Teams: They are used for constant creative work.  Short-term specific task Teams: They are used for temporary tasks.  Executive Team: It is used at top level in order to make use of cross-functional skills and knowledge by CEO. C. Team Building Team Building Strategies: Select members who can contribute and have divergence of skills with a balanced team structure. There is free flow of communication. Teams can be cross-functional, crosscultural, cross-demographic. Develop strong bonds with other formal and informal teams Team Building Interventions:Diagnosing barriers to effective team performance, Improving task accomplishment and relations between team members, Understanding and managing group process and culture, Role analysis, clarification and negotiation Essential Conditions for Team Building:Clear assigned role for every member, Collective responsibility for action of each member, Team must speak with one voice, No appeal from one member to another, and No inordinate difference in salary of members Ingredients of Team Building:Get people with complementary skills, Let members know each other and emphasize they have to work together, Ask for ideas, suggestions and experiences, Deal with high priority problems, Develop realistic action plans and solutions and implement them and Assess actual vs expected results Team Building Goals:  Directing member’s skills and behaviour towards business goals and translating into specific performance requirements of members  Enhancing creativity and morale  Improve synergy to achieve higher productivity of team as compared to individuals  Provide scope for greater pride for members in job performance and build employee loyalty  Improve skills of members by mutual learning and develop problem-solving skills D. Team Roles, Norms and Cohesiveness Team Roles: Activities of each role:  Team Leader: Finds new team members, judges their talents and personalities, improves his abilities and communication  Challenger: Analyze team’s long-term effectiveness, possible failures and correct faults. They challenge team goals and methods. They strive for the best.  Implementer: He ensures smooth running of the actions, predicts delays and provide information.  External contact: Look after team’s external relationships, provide resources and other’s needs. They handle confidential information.  Coordinator: Makes a cohesive plan, understands interrelation of tasks, and maintains networks.  Idea generator: Sees every problem as an opportunity. Encourages team’s vitality and energy.  Inspector: Ensures high standards are sought and maintained. Enforces rules, judges performances, addresses problems, praises success and finds faults  Contributor: Provide technical information, push the team to set high standards use resources wisely. They focus on details and do not see big picture.  Collaborator: They focus on goals and are flexible to new ideas. They are willing to work outside their roles. They focus on big-picture and miss the basic tasks.  Communicator: He is process-oriented, effective listener, resolves conflicts, builds consensus, gives feedback, builds positive climate. Team Norms: Norms are standards about behaviour that team members are expected to exhibit. Though Norms vary from team to team, all teams have common norms appearance, social norms and performance norms. Employees modify values, attitudes and behaviour in accordance with the team.Adjustment of employee’s behaviour to align with the norms of the team is called conformity. Team Cohesiveness: It increases when employees spend more time together, team size is small, there is close and frequent interaction of members, Members agree on common goals and aim at increase in team status, there is competition with other teams, members are homogenous in age, needs, background and attitudes, task requires interdependent efforts and Team experiences performance success or failure. E. Self Managing and Virtual Teams Employee Empowerment: It refers to enabling a lower level employee to make all decisions required for carrying out his duties on his own and implement them.Organizational restructuring through Business Process Re-engineering is possible only with employee empowerment.Empowerment enables better customer service without any loss of time at point of contact. Job Enrichment: It provides authority to make decisions and responsibility to implement those decisions and control activities to achieve job goals and accountable to job targets. It provides freedom to employee to perform job and satisfies his esteem needs through self-management. Characteristics of Empowered Teams:  No barriers between people and departments  Formulate a vision  People at all levels are made champions of the vision  Create feeling of belongingness  Encourage creativity  Keep organization strengths simple  Employees learn and teach self-leadership Conditions for Effective Team Empowerment:  Provide information to all employees  Create conducive organizational culture  Employees should understand job specifications  Management should delegate authority  Encourage employees to take risks  Reward employees frequently  Employees should have power to make substantive decisions Virtual Teams: Characteristics include Flexi-work, flexi-time and flexi-place, Job / activity sharing, Home-based working, Dependency on IT, Loose organizational boundaries, De-jobbing, Multiskillingand Goal directed and customer centred Virtual Teams: Critical success factors include Supportive human resources policies, Training and Multi-directional flow of information and communication technology, State-of-the-art IT, Flexible work and organizational cultureand Understanding members via on-line interactions Difference between Normal and Virtual Teams:  Virtual teams are dependent on IT  They cant take advantage of non-verbal cues in communication  They cant take advantage of role of culture in team interaction  They encounter issue of time differences  They cant take advantage of private and confidential communication channels  No provision for recording team processes