Increasing Operate Group Effectiveness in Team Building

Too typically team building is 1 of these vague, misused terms managers contact into play as a

panacea for sluggish perform unit efficiency. The rise within the recognition and use of team

building has paralleled the increasing perception of operate as the output of teams of workers in

lieu of as compartmentalized tasks on an assembly line. Field Analysis Findings, which include

the ones carried out by the American Productivity & Quality Center during their white-collar

productivity improvement, multi-organizational field research efforts clearly demonstrate the

importance of effective team structures to the overall performance effectiveness of the

knowledge/service worker.

The building of a group requires a great deal more effort than simply recognizing the

interdependence among workers and perform units. It requires, instead, several carefully

managed steps and is an ongoing cyclical approach. The team-building procedure presented in

this article offers the members of a function group a way to observe and analyze behaviors and

activities that hinder their effectiveness and to develop and implement courses of action that

overcome recurring problems.

While the underlying purpose of Team Building is to develop a more effective work group, the

specific purposes of the approach will depend largely upon the assessment of information

gathered during the initial data collection phase. A lack of clear goals and expected performance

outcomes: Frequently, interview data from work group members reveal that their overall

performance is generally directed by their individual (and usually conflicting) performance

goals.

In that situation, the team-building model can be directed at establishing overall function group

goals, which affect both individual and group effort and behavior, and, ultimately, the

functionality outcomes at both the individual, as well as the group level. Interpersonal conflict

and distrust: A lack of trust, supportiveness and communication not only slows down the day-to-

day ability of a Team building activities group to get perform done, but also stands in the way of

resolving the conflicts that naturally arise because the group makes decisions about its future

efforts.