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CHAPTER 14
by4THGROUP
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According to many organizational analysts, the successof an organization can depend on the levels of
teamwork it employs. Teams have a great deal of
potential to contribute to modern organizational life.
Positive working teams encourage flexibility,
involvement and efficiency and the introduction of
teamworking has been known to transform companies
Entirely. We need to know the essential characteristicsof a successful team, to define the most important
processes which contribute to effective teamwork, and
to work out what can go wrong when we try to develop
teams.
INTRODUCTION
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This chapter confronts all these questions andemphasizes that the quality of communication, allied to
the quality of the team members, makes the real
difference.
This chapter also highlights another important issue.
Organizations can consider the more fundamental
challenge of moving to a team-based structure. This isnot simply about adjusting group relationships; it is a
much more radical reorganization of the way work is
designed and allocated
INTRODUCTION
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This chapter will:
Define an effective team;
Show how important effective teams are to modern
organizations, and comment on the moves toempowered work teams;
Analyse important processes which can influence
group and team working, including team roles,
leadership and problem-solving; Discuss how we can develop teams in organizations.
OBJECTIVES
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Business communication suggests that teams havethree key identifiers, namely:
1. members are operating within a charter
2. they see themselves as having specified roles
3. they see the team as accountable for achieving
specified organizational goals.
(Dwyer, 1997)
WHAT MAKES A TEAM?
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Leading American experts Katzenbach and Smith
distinguish different types of team/group and argue
that high performance teams are much more
effective than working groups.
The critical differences they see between teams and
working groups are the levels of commitment and
the strong sense of mutual support and
accountability (which are perhaps not emphasized
sufficiently in the definition from Dwyer).
WHAT MAKES A TEAM?
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Six basic elements of a team1. Size
2. Skills
3. Purpose
4. Goals
5. Working approach
6. Mutual Accountability
WHAT MAKES A TEAM?
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Katzenbach and Smith also define other varieties of group/team, as
follows.
The pseudo-team : A working group may call itself a team whenactually there is no real shared responsibility. Its membersfailure to
share and coordinate may make them perform worse than a workinggroup which has fewer pretensions.
The potential team : The potential team is the group which istrying to move to full teamwork but which is probably still not clear
on its goals and priorities and which is still struggling with the
problem of individual responsibilities and loyalties.
WHAT MAKES A TEAM?
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Turning groups into teams is not easy. It takes timeand it depends on an understanding of fundamentalgroup dynamics, issues such as:
Group development;
Team roles;
Leadership;
Problem-solving and decision-making;
Intergroup relationships (relationships betweengroups).
GROUP & TEAM PROCESSES
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Group Development
Many business texts paint a very definite pictureof how groups change over time, as in:
When a group of people form a team, they gothrough a set of behaviours that help to form
the team into a viable working unit, After a teamhas formed, normed and stormed then, and only
then, can it move on to the most successfulstage of team behaviour.
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This four stages in a definite sequence is based on the work of Tuckman (1965)
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Many texts agree on a few fundamental points:1. Leaders have special qualities which we can identify;
2. Leaders have an important effect on their organizations;
3. We need leaders, and only one leader in each situation.
A recent return to the traditional notion of the leader as a dominantpersonalityis the work of Edwin Locke. He suggests that theprime movers,
the creators of great wealth in a free (and even semi-free) economy, possess
special qualities. He categorizes these qualities into three groups:
1. Cognitive qualities, including being honest, independent and self-
confident;
2. Motivation, including egoisticpassion for the workand commitmentto
action;
3. Attitude towards employees, which includes respecting their ability and
rewarding them on merit.
Understanding Leadership
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1. Vision, communication and networkingemphasizing the leaders
need to communicate a clear vision for the group or organization.2. Culture and valuesemphasizing the leadersrole in building and
maintaining an appropriate culture for the group to work in and for
the leader to be concerned with values and goals.
3. Leadership as situated action trying to provide a more
sophisticated analysis of the situations that leaders can take an
action in every situation that happended
4. Leadership as skilled behaviour, making a more detailed analysis of
the skills and behaviour which goodleaders use.
5. Cultural differences, recognizing that there may be some commonqualities required of leaders in many cultures but that these will be
expressed differently.
6. Power and authority structures, looking at the different forms of
power which leaders may use and how followers see their power
and authority
Recent Development in Leadership Research
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Another important issue is the difference between leadership andmanagement, Leaders are people who do the right things and managers are
people who do things right
The Leader The Manager
Creates and communication the vision control
Develops power base Is appointed
Initiates and leads change Maintains status quo
Sets objectives Concentrates on result
Leadership & Management
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There have been many studies which show that
groups can fail to solve problems or can makeineffective decisions if they ignore some of the
following:
1. Determining the type of task2. Problem -solving barriers, biases and traps.
Problem-Solving and Decision-Making
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On the positive side, we can suggest that the quality of communication is
critical on both simple and complex tasks. What is still not clear is some of therelationships between communication, interaction and other components of
the decision-making process.
Communication and Decision-Making
We can say that group goals are important. Research in this area suggests the
following practical strategies:
1. setting goals which cover all aspects of the performance;
2. providing regular feedback on progress;
3. encouraging communication between members;
4. encouraging and supporting planning activities;
5. helping group members manage failure.
Another problem is that groups may fail to recognize that they are not
considering all the alternative information or courses of action which they
need in order to arrive at a balanced decision.
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INTERGROUP RELATIONSHIP
QUESTION : When is a group not one group?
ANSWER : When its an intergroup!
In other words, when we communicate with another person we
may choose to communicate with them on the basis of the social
categories which we occupy, as in the following examples: I am lecturer, you are student.
I am manager, you are trade union representative.
I am engineer, you are from sales and marketing.
In each case we may be more aware of our groupresponsibilitiesthan of our more individual characteristics, and
this can have a very powerful influence on our behaviour.
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SO HOW CAN WE DEVELOP MORE
EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND
WORKING GROUPS
Identify all the process problems which might
be impeding the group progress
Try to resolve each one in turn
According to observations Hilarie Owen, the team is characterizedby expectations and striving for outstanding performance.
Strategies and skills required to create such teams include open
communication, negotiating the success criteria, planning both
the goals and the process, and effective leadership.
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Different Ways of Mending Teamwork
West (1994) suggests five main types of team-
building interventions is :
1. Team start-up
2. Regular formal reviews
3. Addressing known task-related problems
4. Identifying problems5. Social process interventions
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SUMMARY
Research suggests that the critical differences between
effective teams and working groups are the level of
commitment and the strong sense of mutual support and
accountability.
In order to create effective teams, we must understand the
most important processes which can influence group and
team working, including group development, team roles,
leadership, problem-solving and intergroup behaviour
There are several models of group development but none is
inevitable if the members make an open attempt to review
their processes.
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SUMMARY
The role of leader may be critical, and modern views of
leadership place particular emphasis on aspects of
communication.
We can develop teams through improved communication,
either by conscious reflection on their major processes and
adopting strategies for effective working or by using
specific team-building interventions.
It is important to choose the right team-building
intervention to suit the situation; different types have
different aims and scope and will satisfy different needs.