People in organizations must have the ability to work in a team environment, such as workplace, community, charity, church, and academic study groups. Small groups are formed to communicate, face-to-face, in order to fulfill a common purpose and achieve a group goal. Over 90 percent of the Fortune 500 companies use decision-making groups in their daily operations. Whatever type of group one is involved in, members interact with each other to gain positive results. Team members must enhance their listening skills to learn, grow, and feel our thoughts expanding and get insights when interacting in group situations. Many individual ideas grow by brainstorming with others. Small groups of people who relate to one another in ways that make them interdependent to some significant degree. Although working together interdependently is effective, conflicts do arise.
Conflict is frequently characterized as a controversy between interrelated individuals who intervene with one another in reaching their objectives (McReady 191). When there is a breakdown in communication, conflicts will arise; however, there are effective ways to resolve them. Improved communication is the key to keeping work teams on course. Because of the rapid change in corporate society of today, this remains true more than ever before.
One conflict in work teams is not being able to adapt to changing situations. Change of time, as well as place for meeting places, are facts of life. When team members don’t make themselves available, don’t pay attention, and don’t inform each other on time, these issues can cause problems. For instance, Mark, the marketing manager, was promoting a new product and set a meeting for Tuesday, January 15, at one o’clock. Ten executives were invited two weeks prior to this meeting. An urgent service came up and the marketing manager had a flight that afternoon. The day prior to the meeting, he sent e-mail to all ten executives, asking them to arrive at eleven o’clock a.m. instead of one o’clock p.m. Art, the graphic designer, was not aware of the time change until he arrived at the office. The receptionist informed him that the meeting had started already at eleven o’clock a.m. He burst into the room one hour late, interrupted the meeting, and began ramping and raging and blaming Mark for not receiving prior no...
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... Appreciate diversity and try to understand the individual’s personal characteristics, attitudes, and values of others. Make the extra effort to get along with others whose beliefs and backgrounds are vastly different from your own. Take steps to balance assignments and stress the importance of doing the share of the workload. It is necessary to have input from all the members from start to finish.
Small groups are constantly forming within organizations for a number of reasons. To support the group’s efforts and provide better teamwork environment, individuals must know how to interact with each other effectively. Synergy is the fruit of finding a win-win situation. Groups often come up with solutions that are superior to the thinking of any single member. When conflicts occur within a group, members must continue to learn how to resolve them with appropriate methods and techniques. It is important to know and practice these techniques in order to avoid waste of time, hard feelings, and loss of productivity. As group members learn to understand the others’ point of view, they often find their own point of view changed through increased understanding.
The work place, social organizations, educational institutes, and community groups all use teams to accomplish projects and goals. The environment of teams determine if these projects and goals will be met in an efficient manner. As businesses and organizations continue to restructure work teams, the need for training in disagreement resolution will grow.
How a team works together affects its ability to complete a project or task cooperatively. “Each person in a group could have different ideas about the best way to solve a given problem” (Working Together, 171). Team members must “learn to be open to new ideas and develop skills in listening, questioning, and consensus building” (Working Together 173). A lack of trust among team members constrained their individual and collective voices, restricting the sharing of knowledge, experience, and opinions” (Working Together, 174). With a foundation of trust within a team, the groundwork for open communication is built. However, communication barriers may lead to disharmony among team members. Building trust and creating an atmosphere that fosters open communication enables team members to feel comfortable voicing their opinion. Without this, some team members may be “afraid to express a contrary point of ...
Conflict Resolution: Understand to Achieve. Whenever people unite to work as a team for anything more than a brief duration, some conflict is normal, and should be expected (Engleberg, Wynn & Schutter, 2003). Because of the inevitability of conflict, being able to recognize, address, and ultimately resolve it is vitally important, since unresolved conflict may have undesirable effects, including reduced morale, or increased turnover (De Janasz, Dowd & Schneider, 2001). Just as conflicts within team environments vary, so do methods for resolving them.
In several occasions, conflict occurs in the communication of one or two people. Several people have thought of conflict as cases involving pouring of furious anger in a communication process. Nonetheless, conflict is the misinterpretation of an individual’s words or values (Huan & YAzdanifard, 2012). Conflict can also be due to limited resources in an organization (Riaz & Junaid, 2010). Conflict may as well arise due to poor communication or the use of inappropriate communication channel of transmission of information between the involved parties. Management of conflict has various conflict management styles that include avoidance style, forcing style, passive-aggressive style, accommodating style, collaborating style and compromising style. Workplace conflict comes in two different kinds: task involving conflict, which focuses on the approaches used in resolving the problem and blaming conflict that has the aspects of blame and never brings element of resolving problems between the conflicting parties. In the perception of several individuals, relationship conflict is negative.
Along with the preparation for conflict resolutions, understanding the situation in the team during the conflict is important. Clarifying positions along with listing the facts and all the necessary analyzation of the particular situation helps in resolving the conflict in a team. Applying this process can effectively address and resolve the conflict in a
An effective team typically develops through several stages. Tuckman and Jensen developed a model for how teams should develop that includes five stages: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning (as cited in Martin ,2006 and Fulk, Bell,& Bodie ,2011). In forming, the first stage in team development, team members are introduced to the team’s purpose and goals(Martin, 2006 ; Fulk et al. ,2011). Fulk et al. (2011) explain that members are usually motivated and excited about working together to accomplish the specific goal, but they point out that interactions among team members can be affected by uncertainty about purpose, anxiety, mistrust ,and reluctance to share ideas and opinions. Nevertheless, despite such uncertainties, team members usually avoid conflict and move on to the next stage, storming(Fulk et al.,2011). Unlike the forming stage, the storming stage is marked by conflict (Martin...
As the processes and systems used in business have become more complex, teams, not individuals, have become popular in many organizations. Teams are made up of individuals from an organization brought together to solve a problem, improve a process or implement a new process. “A major advantage that a team has over an individual is its diversity of resources and ideas” (Burns, 1995, p. 52). However, this diversity can cause conflict within the team. The success of the team is strongly influenced by the team’s ability to recognize the causes of, manage and resolve conflict.
It is important to distinguish the difference between teams and groups. The main difference is that teams work altogether toward a common goal whereas groups can work altogether but for their own objective. It is important to highlight that a group does not necessary need a leader to follow but a team does and this leader will set directions to achieve the goal. In teams people are more committed as they share their ideas, they know the purpose of what they are doing and what the others are doing, they understand better individual objectives and team objectives whereas in groups, generally people are just told what they have to do without further explanations. Because in a team people get to know each other, it builds trust and enhances communication but in groups, people do not really know each other, do not trust or communicate effectively with each other. In teams it is frequent to see constructive conflict as people talk more openly and more honestly but in group it is quite rare. Eventually, people in teams are more involv...
For a team to be successful there are several factors that have to be addressed in order for a fluent, functioning group of individuals combined to achieve a certain goal. This goal can be a variety of different endings from producing minor results to making decisions that create a major impact on a large scale. Within a team environment conflict is always presence. Conflict is essential to the advancement of teams and must be managed in a proper way to avoid destruction and division amongst the group of individuals. From sports, to education, and the workplace teamwork is present in everyday life. As a human race we all work in different team oriented situations in order to accomplish a variety of tasks.
Stewart, G., Manz, C., & Sims, H., (1999). Teamwork and Group Dynamics. New York: Wiley. pp. 70- 125.
A group can only be called a team if the members are actively working together toward a common goal. A team must have the capability to set goals, make decisions, solve problems, and share responsibilities. For a team to be successful, trust must be earned between its members by being consistent and reliable (Temme & Katzel, 2005). When more than one person is working on a particular task, inconsistent views or opinions commonly arise. People come from different backgrounds and live through different life experiences therefore, even when working towards a common goal, they will not always see eye to eye. Major conflict that is not dealt with can devastate a team or organization (Make Conflict Work, 2008). In some situations, conflict can be more constructive than destructive. Recognizing the difference between conflict that is constructive to the team and conflict that is destructive to the team is important. Trying to prevent the conflict is not always the best way to manage conflict when working within a team setting. Understanding conflict, what causes it, and how to resolve conflict effectively, should consume full concentration.
From the beginning, where we were unfamiliar with each other and became a team, my team and I had started to learn each other name and getting to know each other. Throughout each meeting, we slowly start to feel more comfortable and open minded with each other. Not only are we getting familiar with each other, each meeting that was held we progress of becoming an effective team member, we learn our strengths and weaknesses of everyone. During the meetings, we learn many concepts from the textbook, “Communicating in Small Groups: Principles and Practices” by Steven A. Beebe and John T. Masterson. We were able to learn different types of concept in the textbook and utilized it as a team to complete certain tasks. The three concepts that impacted my team and I are human
Working in teams provides an opportunity for individuals to come together and establish a rapport towards others within a group. Teamwork is classified as people with different strengths and skills who work together to achieve a common goal. When a team works well, specific objectives are fulfilled and satisfied. Teamwork plays a crucial role in implementing and fulfilling a common goal in a team project. Each member plays a role and takes on different responsibilities combined together. In different stages of teamwork, conflicts and arguments may occur for as members have different standpoints which need to be harmonized within the team. The key to having an effective teamwork is to explore each member's unique abilities to motivate them.
In a team-oriented setting, everyone contributes to how well the group succeeds overall. You work with fellow members of the group to complete the work that needs to be done. Having the right people in the correct roles is an important factor in measuring the success of a team, where you are united with the other members to complete the main goals. Every group is made up of definite strengths and weaknesses. Our team's 3-5 major strengths necessary to work accordingly consist of Informer, Summarizer, Orienter, Piggy-Backer, and Encourager. One of our strengths as a team is that we get input from everyone involved. Every member of our team is a leader in some way. Part of being a good leader is knowing how important it is to receive the best ideas from each member of their team. We attend group meetings where we discuss any challenges, issues, and problems. At these meetings, we often exchange ideas or brainstorm new ones with each other and come up with the best and most creative team solutions as potential answers to those perceived problems.
Another important aspect in towards positive group dynamics is to make all members feel accepted in spite of any diversity. Trust is an important trait for the survival of a group. More importantly, the likelihood of accomplishing goals increases with maximum trust and confidence. However, numerous personalities with different backgrounds may cause friction while attempting to resolve conflicts or reaching a consensus. These challenging situations can lead to stress and tension amongst the group members, but when successfully resolved they lead to further strengthening of the bonds and the emergence of a more cohesive group. Also certain measures can be taken to avoid certain petty discrepancies right from the beginning. Specific ground rules; code of ethics and conduct should be established that would encourage smooth functioning and efficient target