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Reflections on team collaboration
Theory and personal experience of teamwork
Theory and personal experience of teamwork
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Recommended: Reflections on team collaboration
Every day in our life we come across challenges. It becomes imperative that we find solutions to them. Some problems we need to face alone and some we need to encounter as a team. I worked in several teams all my professional life and I believe that any task can be easily completed when there is coordination between the members of the team. In this reflection paper I would like to present my views on the importance of defining roles, advantages of being with the same team, challenges in a diversified group and the significance of trusting team members.
Defining Roles
“Roles are positions in a group that have a set of expected behaviours attached to them“(John and Saks, 2011: Page 225 of quote). I feel that most of the problems in a team occur because roles are not clearly defined. Roles provide sense of direction to the team members and drive them towards the common goal. I would like to quote my experience when I joined as a trainee to depict the importance of roles in a team. Our team had two tasks, supporting the existing applications and developing new applications. Even though there were 6 members in our team, there used to be issues every day. There used to be slippages in deadlines and we used to miss support tickets too. This went on for about 3 months and our lead arranged a meeting to find out the reason behind our poor performance. The first and foremost thing that popped up was that none of the members of sure of their roles. Everyone concentrated on just one task and as a result we always defaulted. Drastic improvement in our team’s performance after each member was assigned a specific role proved the importance of team roles. My practical experience combined with the theoretical proof that “Role ambiguity causes...
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...hin few months she started working efficiently and the outcome was that we won best team award within our entire account.
To conclude, there might be several reasons behind exceptional or poor performance of a team but I regard the points mentioned above highly and I feel that if the above issues are taken care then the team would perform to their potential, providing exceptional results.
References
1. Organizational Behaviour, Sixth Edition by Gary Johns & Alan M. Saks
2. Why teams don’t work – Interview by Diane Coutu
3. Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups by Vanessa Urch Druskat and Stephen B.Wolff
4. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Managing_Groups_and_Teams/Diversity#How_Are_Diverse_Teams_Different_From_Homogenous_Ones.3F
5. http://jmo.e-contentmanagement.com/archives/vol/10/issue/1/article/382/trust-a-neglected-variable-in-team-effectiveness
There are four most common forms of teams you are likely to find in an organization. The first type of team is the problem solving teams, this team will meet each other every week to discuss on how they will improve work process and their methodology. They will create a very innovative solution but they will still keep looking for a problem to go with it. The second type of teams is the self-managed teams, composed of 10-15 employees who perform highly related on interdependent jobs and take on many responsibilities of their former supervisors. This team leads to a system where there is a mutual responsibility among the members. Self-managed teams’ responsibilities include collective control over the pace of work, determination of work assignments, Organization of breaks and collective choice of inspection procedures used. Self-managed teams select their own members, and the members evaluate each other’s performance.
A group of people working on a team means a group of different sets of minds working together. Thus, it is inevitable that there may arise conflicts on a certain topic within the team, as certain viewpoint may seem right for the circumstances for some teammates and may different for others. However, it is not that they are not solvable.
Seven tasks must be included in consideration of team dynamics and structure. The first of which is defining the goal, mission or function of a specific team. The team must know what it is being asked to accomplish. The second area of consideration is assessing what skills, abilities, knowledge or potential to acquire such would be needed amongst selected team members. Identification of potential team members should include an assessment of the skills, knowledge and abilities or the potential to acquire such so that ultimately the team has the building blocks with which to succeed in its mission, goal or function. This assessment must include an understanding of realistic potential contributions by potential team members with the included assessment of whether or not the acquisition of skills and knowledge can be made available through research and analysis.
There are many aspect of group dynamics such as leadership, group norms, efficacy beliefs and roles. For the sport of netball, the aspects of roles will be covered as in netball a player may play in more than one position or have different roles in the team with different responsibilities throughout the season. A role is defined as a set of behaviours expected from a person occupying a position in a specific context (Biddle & Thomas, 1966; Katz & Kahn, 1978). Bales and Slater (1955) suggests that roles can vary on the function that it serves. One of the functions suggested is a task related function. The responsibilities of these roles are orientated towards the instrumental objectives of the group such as a team captain. The second type of role functions is that of a social nature. These roles tend to be responsible for the maintenance and harmony of the group such as a social organiser or team clown. Mabry and Barnes (1980) proposed that roles should be separated into formal and informal roles. Formal roles are those that are given to the individual by the organisation and informal roles are those that occur over time due to the interactions within the group.
In David Wright’s “The Myths and Realities of Teamwork,” (Wright, D., 2013), he outlines six myths that are ubiquitous and perpetuated by many people. Here is a short examination of all six.
Teamwork is one of the important component that is required in any types of business organization . Team is defines as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to the common purpose, performance goal, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable”(katzenbach and Smith 1993) . Teamwork offer numbers of advantages like in teamwork work are completed earlier because large task are divided into smaller projects and then it find out an individual who is best for doing the jobs. Tasks that are smaller in size also need less time and brainpower then the work is less sporting to the people who are working. Teamwork also helps in combing the unique skills of people and makes them work efficiently. In a teamwork strength of different people are combined for the benefit of entire team and to produce better product and teamwork also help in building the unity among the group member .In a teamwork relationship play an important role because it helps people to communicate properly with one another whereas friendship helps in creating a job satisfaction. Support system is also important because if support system will be stronger than people will be comfortably depend on each other. These are the advantage of the teamwork but in teamwork there are also disadvantage like in teamwork there is an uneven participation of the members because they depend on other for doing the majority of work this can lead to hatred in the workplace. In a teamwork everyone is not team player, as they cannot perform well while team is working because they want to do there own so they might face problems to get fitted in a certain work culture, which will result in displeasure. In teamwork there is less creativity among th...
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.
To start off on the right path, the team must understand what they are working towards. They must be committed to work hard in order to accomplish their goals. Each member should have expectations from everyone and themselves as part of the team.
In conclusion, we feel as if we built trust in our team. Seeing as how we’re leaders in our own way, we each created a culture of trust among ourselves. Once we got to know each other personally and shared some personal information about ourselves, our families, hobbies, and other interests, that’s when we started to develop a bond and all the trust built up between us. And this paper assessed our group’s 3-5 major strengths and weaknesses and what successful strategies we hope to add to our team to build a more effective team in the future. Thank you for reading.
A work team will be defined for the purposes of this paper by a definition borrowed from Bateman and Snell (2004). A team is formed of people (usually a small number) with complementary skills who trust one another and are committed to a common purpose, common performance goals, and a common approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. Teams generally see themselves and are seen by others as a social entity, which is interdependent because of the tasks performed as members of a group.
Many businesses place an emphasis on the importance of teamwork. A good team consists of people with different skills, abilities and characters. A successful team is able to blend these differences together to enable the organisation to achieve its desired objectives.
It is important that members of a group be knowledgeable and skillful in their positions, the degree to which those members can work harmoniously and cooperatively together is equally important and will form into a high performance team. Effective team management plays a high role in building high performance teams. It should always be a question as to what management can do to actively promote successful work teams.
Team members in effective teams know what is expected, what is most important and how their performance will be evaluated. The roles of each individual must be clear or effective teamwork may be difficult to achieve (NBRII, 2015). The characteristics of an effective team include clear understanding of the purpose, respect, trust and support, honest, good communication skills, respect and the ability to manage conflicts (University of Texas, 2015). In planning, the Belbin team theory categorises each individual into their team roles. Meredith Belbin identified nine roles: implementer, co-ordinator, shaper, plant, resource investigator, and monitor/evaluator, team worker, completer/finisher and specialist which was added in 1988 (Johnson, 2015). The strengths and weaknesses of each role are in Figure 1. Thus, according to Belbin, effective teams should include all or most of the nine roles. This categorisation ensures that all aspects within planning are being met and therefore, the best outcome of the project can be
Teamwork is one of the important component that is required in any types of business organization . Team is defines as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to the common purpose, performance goal, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable”(katzenbach and Smith 1993) . Teamwork offer numbers of advantages like in teamwork work are completed earlier because large task are divided into smaller projects and then it find out an individual who is best for doing the jobs. Tasks that are smaller in size also need less time and brainpower then the work is less sporting to the people who are working. Teamwork also helps in combing the unique skills of people and makes them work efficiently. In a teamwork strength of different people are combined for the benefit of entire team and to produce better product and teamwork also help in building the unity among the group member .In a teamwork relationship play an important role because it helps people to communicate properly with one another whereas friendship helps in creating a job satisfaction. Support system is also important because if support system will be stronger than people will be comfortably depend on each other. These are the advantage of the teamwork but in teamwork there are also disadvantage like in teamwork there is an uneven participation of the members because they depend on other for doing the majority of work this can lead to hatred in the workplace. In a teamwork everyone is not team player, as they cannot perform well while team is working because they want to do their own so they might face problems to get fitted in a certain work culture, which will result in displeasure. In teamwork there is less creativity among th...
The work community has several members, it is vital that these individuals act as a group, so that the common goal was achieved. This section describes the team, the team's importance, team building and why before-mentioned issues are important. This section also takes place through the cases and at the end of the self-evaluation.