Team Work Beneficial For Organisation And Its Members Management Essay

Published Date: 23 Mar 2015

Researchers suggest that 'individuals are better than teams at generating new ideas, but the teams are better than individuals at evaluating ideas'. First, let us try to understand what does the term 'Team' actually mean.

A team comprises of a group of people who all are committed to serve a common purpose. It generally operates with a common approach and the people in it are always mutually accountable.

STAGES OF TEAM DEVELOPMENT

The teams though often keep changing the order of development owing to the constant change of members in it.

Forming

The actual formation of the team takes place in this stage. The team interacts and learns about the challenges and agrees on their goals. This is considered as the most important stage as the basic interaction between the team members takes place here.

Storming

The team argues about the different ideas that are to be considered. Since all the team members actively participate, this stage is considered necessary for the growth of the team.

Norming

The team members start to adjust each other's behaviour and make work to seem more natural and free flowing. They agree on each other's rules, working methods and ideas. A sense of mutual trust begins to develop among them.

Performing

The teams begin to perform their tasks as unit without any supervision. The members of the team tend to be become interdependent, motivated and knowledgeable.

Adjourning

The final stage where the task is accomplished and the team begins to celebrate its achievement. Since the team gets dissolved, this stage is also referred to as 'Deforming and Mourning' stage.

EFFECTIVENESS IN TEAM WORK

Having got an idea of what a team really means, now let us try to get a pinch of some of the issues that should be taken care for the proper functioning of a team,

A pleasant atmosphere should be maintained within it and all its members should sustain a good relationship among themselves

All the members should be made to actively participate

The members should all be made aware and also accept their team goals

If any misunderstanding arises in the team, they should be resolved as and when possible

Performance evaluation should be carried out frequently

Labour should be equally divided among all the members and they should be given the freedom to express their concerns.

In order for the team work to be beneficial to an organisation and its employees, the practise of it should be made effective enough. Hackman suggests three different criteria's for assessing a team's effectiveness. Firstly, it is the actual output of the team. Secondly, the entire team should work as a performing unit. Thirdly, each member of the team should be satisfied with the experience of working in it. Some of the other factors that adds to determine a team's effectiveness are as follows,

Effort

There are some factors which intensifies the quantity of effort the members of the team disburse on carrying out the given task,

Work Design

The motivating factor of the team very much relies on its work design. Hackman states that a higher degree of effort is achieved from the team only if the task they perform is found to be challenging, has a major impact on the organisation or its clients, is totally owned by the team and gives out regular feedback on the team members performance.

Reward System

Efforts will be higher if there is a reward system in place. It provides the team with challenging objectives and emphasizes their accomplishment. Hence it directly paves way for the team member's growth and indirectly aids the organisations augmentation.

Knowledge and Skill

The members of the team should be both technically as well functionally competent. The effective performance of a team mainly depends on the resources (Knowledge and Skill) it possesses in order to complete the given job.

Team Composition

A team's composition is mainly determined by the level of expertise it has pertaining to the performing task. But normally the team's composition is determined either by seniority or by personal predilection instead of taking into account the ability or the technical expertise it possesses.

Team Size

Though many teams in an organisation tend to be large, it does not paves way for the effective functioning of the team. The major issue being that if the number of members in a team's increases then the degree of interaction within the team decreases to a greater extent. Hence the team should contain a maximum of 10-12 members. Increase in the number of members tends to have an adverse effect on the performance of the team.

Decision Making

One of the major factors pursued by a team in order to achieve good results is the 'Decision Making'. All the members of the team should be actively made to participate in the decision making process. Biasing is an important factor that arises during the decision making process. The one being the general biasing where even though there seems to be an abundance of information across all the team members, it is always some people's voice which could be heard owing to their seniority.

The teams normally make accurate decisions when compared to the individuals. There are two reasons to support it. Firstly, when all the members of the team are brought together they all in turn bring about a diversity of knowledge and information which could not be obtained from a single person. Secondly, there would be different approaches by different kinds of people in a team for the problem in progress.

The teams should comprise of a good mix of people in order to make the decision making process effective. It should have a combination of people with different levels of experiences in the problem they are dealing with. The status of the team members should never be considered in the decision making process, this is because the members with a higher status always try to have some amount of influence on the teams solution to the given problem which in some scenarios could be wrong.

There are number of techniques for performing the decision making process in a team. Some of them are as follows,

Brainstorming

A team of about five to ten people sit together and discuss for about an hour about the issues on which they need to generate newer ideas. The entire conversation between the team members are recorded for later assessment.

Delphi Technique

The actual face to face interaction among the team members is absent. Initially each member of the group writes down his ideas and solutions to the reported problem, which are then updated in a common database. Each member of the team, are then sent a copy of the other members contributions and are all expected give out their comments for the same. The above process is repeated until the team arrives at a common solution.

Leadership

A team's success not only depends on its members but mainly on the kind of leader it has. A leader is one who guides as well as acts with his team to achieve their objectives. A good team should have leader who could portray different working styles and also be able to recognise the strengths of his team members as well as tolerate their weakness. Also an excellent team should not be stuck with the one person as its leader all the time.

BENEFITS OF TEAM WORK

Hence by addressing the above issues in order to elevate the effectiveness of team work, utmost benefits could be obtained both for the organisation as well as its members.

Satisfaction

Teams always perform as closely tied unit since they work for achieving a common goal. The interaction among them gives out enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm, which when utilised leads to a greater degree of cooperation and job satisfaction among its members.

Creativity

Each person has different kind of skill sets and knowledge, by utilising them a variety of ideas could be generated which in turn produces an enormous amount of creative solutions leading to extraordinary results.

Support

People generally tend to work to their extreme levels when they feel they have adequate support and encouragement from their fellow workers. Hence this feeling boosts up the sense of companionship within the members which in turn gives out better results.

Speed of Team Work in IT

A software project generally utilizes the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) model. The SDLC comprises of the Planning, Analysing, Implementation, Development, Testing and Maintenance phases. A project in order to give out obvious results has to pass through all these stages. The above process becomes much simpler because of the team work involved. A project is generally assigned to a team and is provided with a delivery date for giving out their final solution. Each members of the team are then further divided into sub teams depending on which phase of the SDLC they are working with.

Consider the amount of time and effort it would require if it's a single person who is going to take care of all the phases. Newer ideas stop to flow in, if the work is being handled by just one person whereas it could be guaranteed in a team work. Also the percentage of slippage that would turn out would be enormous since the amount of knowledge and experience that a single person possesses cannot be compared with that of a team. If in case it takes around 200 hours to complete the given work for a single person, then it would take only around 50 hours to do the same kind of work by a team. Hence team work saves time and effort not only for the organisation but also for its members to a greater extent.

REASONS TO FAILURE

Though team work always ends up in success, there are some scenarios which could reason for its failure,

If there are not enough knowledgeable people

Conflicts between the members of the team owing to the portrayal of different characters

Incapability of some to perform their assigned tasks

Constant changing of the roles of the members within the team

Lack of basic ethos to aid the team growth by the organisation

NEGATIVE QUALITIES OF TEAM WORK

Though team work gives out fruitful results to the organisation as well as its members it also has some negative traits within it,

Loss of control on the members by their superiors

The labour becomes unevenly distributed

The team members begin to waste their time and energy owing to disputes

Some members even opt to move out of the team when they feel they are dispensable

Social loafing occurs, which leaves the burden to other members of the team to perform the left out task

The team members work is often not recognised i.e. some of the members efforts get masked away in team work. Though the entire team worked hard for achieving the goal, the rewards and recognition normally reaches the superiors and leaders of the team

CONCLUSION

In order for an organisation to function effectively team work is absolutely necessary, though there are some negative issues that could be addressed in the longer run. Factors like effort and time could be reduced and cost could be increased to a greater extent if team work is employed. Even for the members, the amount of knowledge and experience that they acquire through team work is enormous. By working in a team they tend to learn more about themselves and also develop a higher degree of people skills which takes both the organisation and its members to greater financial heights. If we can notice, it is mainly because of the above reasons that teamwork is being extensively used in almost all walks of life like healthcare sectors, army's, schools, colleges and different kinds of organisations. Hence both the organisations and its members should get a hold on team work, which acts as an enabler to achieve their desired results at a more faster and efficient rate.