Most organizations significantly improve their effectiveness by using work teams. Let's take a look at managing teams. Work teams consist of a small number of people with complementary skills who hold themselves mutually accountable for pursuing a common purpose, achieving performance goals, and improving interdependent work processes. By this definition, computer programmers working on separate projects in the same department of a company would not be considered a team.
To be a team, the programmers would have to be interdependent and share responsibility and accountability for the quality and amount of computer code they produce. Teams are becoming more important in many industries because they help organizations respond to specific problems and challenges. The work teams are not the answer for every situation or organization. If the right teams are used properly and in the right settings, teams can dramatically improve company performance.
Organizations recognize significant advantages to the use of teams. Let's take a look. Companies are making greater use of teams because teams have been shown to improve customer satisfaction, product and service quality, speed and efficiency in product development, employee job satisfaction and decision-making.
Teams help businesses increase customer satisfaction in several ways. One way is to create work teams that are trained to meet the needs of specific customers. Organizational structures in which management is responsible for organizational outcomes and performance, teams take direct responsibility for the quality of products and services they produce and sell. Another reason for using teams is that teamwork often leads to increased satisfaction.
Teamwork can be more satisfying than traditional work because it gives workers a chance to improve their skills. This is often accomplished through cross-training, in which team members are taught how to do all or most of the jobs performed by other team members. The advantage for the organization is that cross-training allows a team to function normally when one member is absent, quits, or is transferred.
Teamwork is also satisfying because work teams often receive proprietary business information that typically is available to only managers. Team members also gain job satisfaction from unique leadership responsibilities that are not typically available in traditional organizations. Organizations recognize disadvantages of the use of teams as well.
Let's take a look. The first disadvantage of work teams is initially high turnover. Teams aren't for everyone, and some workers balk at the responsibility, effort, and learning required in team settings.
Social loafing is another disadvantage of work teams. Social loafing occurs when workers withhold their efforts and fail to perform their share of the work. Finally, teams share many of the disadvantages of group decision-making, such as groupthink.
In groupthink, members of highly cohesive teams feel intense pressure not to disagree with each other so that the group can approve a proposed solution. Also, team decision-making takes considerable time, and team meetings can often be unproductive and inefficient. As the two previous subsections made clear, teams have significant advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, the question is not whether to use teams, but when and where to use teams for maximum benefit and minimum cost. If the type of reward, individual versus team, is not matched to the type of performance, individual versus team, teams won't work.
However, studies indicate that the amount of autonomy possessed by a team is the key difference among teams. Autonomy is the degree to which workers have discretion, freedom, and independence to decide how and when to accomplish their jobs. The smallest amount of autonomy is found in traditional work groups, where two or more people work together to achieve a shared goal.
In these groups, workers are responsible for doing the work or executing the task, but they do not have the direct responsibility or control over their work. Workers report to managers who are responsible for their performance and have the authority to hire and fire them, make job assignments, and control resources. Employee involvement teams, which have somewhat more autonomy, meet on company time on a weekly or monthly basis and provide advice or make suggestions to management concerning specific issues. Semi-autonomous workgroups not only provide advice and suggestions to management, but also have the authority to make decisions and solve problems related to the major tasks required to produce a product or service. Semi-autonomous workgroups generally receive information about budgets, work quality and performance and competitors'products.
Further, members of semi-autonomous workgroups are typically cross-trained in a number of different skills and tasks. In short, semi-autonomous workgroups give employees the authority to make decisions that are typically made by supervisors and managers. Self-managing teams are different from semi-autonomous workgroups in that team members manage and control all of the major tasks directly related to production of a product or service without first getting approval from management.
Self-designing teams have all the characteristics of self-managing teams, but they also control and change the design of the teams themselves. the tasks they do and when and how they do them, and the membership of the team itself. Companies are also increasingly using several other kinds of teams that can't easily be categorized in terms of autonomy cross-functional teams, virtual teams, and project teams.
Depending on how these teams are designed, they can either be low or high autonomy teams. Cross-functional teams are intentionally composed of employees from different functional areas of the organization. Because their members have different functional backgrounds, education, and experience, cross-functional teams usually attack problems from multiple perspectives and generate more ideas and alternative solutions, all of which are especially important when trying to innovate or solve problems creatively.
Virtual teams are groups of geographically or organizationally dispersed workers who use a combination of telecommunications and information technologies to accomplish an organizational task. Project teams are created to complete specific one-time projects or tasks within a limited time. Project teams are often used to develop new products, significantly improve existing products, roll out new information systems, or build new factories or offices.
The project team is typically led by a project manager who has overall responsibility for planning staffing and managing the team, which usually includes employees from different functional areas. Teams promote creativity, innovation, and flexibility in management. Over time, teams develop norms, which are informally agreed-upon standards that regulate team behavior.
Norms are valuable because they let team members know what's expected of them. Studies indicate that norms are one of the most powerful influences on work behavior because they regulate the everyday actions that allow teams to function effectively. Team norms are most often associated with positive outcomes, such as stronger organizational commitment, more trust in management, and stronger job and organizational satisfaction.
Effective work teams develop norms about the quality and timeliness of job performance, absenteeism, safety, and honest expression of ideas and opinions. Cohesiveness is another important characteristic of work teams. Cohesiveness is the extent to which team members are attracted to a team and motivated to remain in it. What can be done to promote team cohesiveness?
First, make sure that all team members are present at team meetings and activities. Team cohesiveness suffers when members are allowed to withdraw from the team and miss team meetings and events. Second, create additional opportunities for teammates to work together by rearranging work schedules and creating common workspaces. The relationship between team size and performance appears to be curvilinear. Very small or very large teams may not perform as well as moderately sized teams.
When teams get too large, team members find it difficult to get to know one another and the team may splinter into smaller subgroups. When this occurs, subgroups sometimes argue and disagree weakening overall team cohesion. As teams grow, there's also a greater chance of minority domination, where just a few team members dominate team discussions.
From time to time, people who work together are going to disagree about what and how things get done. What causes team conflicts? Although most anything can lead to conflict, casual remarks that unintentionally offend a team member or fighting over scarce resources The primary cause of team conflict is disagreement over team goals and priorities.
Other common causes of team conflict include disagreement over task-related issues, interpersonal incompatibilities, and simple fatigue. Though most people view conflict negatively, the key to dealing with team conflict is not avoiding it, but rather making sure that the team experiences the right kind of conflict. Cognitive conflict is strongly associated with improvements in team performance, whereas affective conflict is strongly associated with decreases in team performance. Why does this happen? With cognitive conflict, team members disagree because of their different experiences and expertise lead them to different views of the problem or solution.
By contrast, effective conflict often results in hostility, anger, resentment, distrust, cynicism, and apathy. Managers who participated on teams that experienced effective conflict described their teammates as manipulative, secretive, burned out, and political. There are several ways teams can have a good fight. First, work with more rather than less information. Second, develop multiple alternatives to enrich debate.
Focusing on multiple solutions diffuses conflict by getting the team to keep searching for a better solution. Positions and opinions are naturally more flexible with five alternatives than with just two. Third, establish common goals. Remember, most team conflict arises from disagreements over team goals and priorities. Therefore, common goals encourage collaboration and minimize conflict.
over a team's purpose. The stages of team development are forming, storming, norming, and performing. So here you can see the stages of team development, starting with forming, storming, norming, and performing. Although not every team passes through each of these stages, teams that do tend to be better performers.
This holds true even for teams composed of seasoned executives. After a period of time, however, if a team's not managed well, its performance may start to deteriorate as the team begins a process of decline and progresses through the stages of denorming, destorming, and deforming. Forming is the first stage of team development in which team members meet with one another, form initial impressions, and begin to establish team norms.
Storming is the second stage of development characterized by conflict and disagreement, in which team members disagree over what the team should do and how it should do it. Norming is the third stage of development in which team members begin to settle into their roles, group cohesion grows, and positive team norms develop. Performing is the fourth and final stage of team development, in which performance improves because the team has matured into an effective, fully functioning team. De-norming a reversal of the norming stage in which the team performance begins to decline as the size, scope, goal, or members of the team change.
De-storming is a reversal of the storming phase in which the team's comfort level decreases, team cohesion weakens, and angry emotions and conflicts may flare. Understanding team development helps managers ensure effective teamwork. Fortunately, team goals also improve team performance.
In fact, team goals lead to much higher team performance 93% of the time. What can companies and teams do to ensure that team goals lead to superior team performance? One increasingly popular approach is to give teams stretch goals.
Stretch goals are extremely ambitious goals that workers don't know how to reach. Four things must occur for stretch goals to effectively motivate teams. First, teams must have a high degree of autonomy or control over how they achieve their goals. Second, teams must be empowered with control of resources such as budgets, workspaces, computers, or whatever else they need to do their jobs.
Structural accommodation means giving teams the ability to change organizational structures, policies, and practices if doing so helps them meet their stretch goals. And finally, teams need bureaucratic immunity. Bureaucratic immunity means that teams no longer have to go through frustratingly slow processes of multi-level reviews and sign-offs to get management approval before making changes.
Once granted bureaucratic immunity, teams are immune from the influence of various organizational groups and are accountable only to top management. To be successful, teams need sufficient training. particularly in interpersonal skills, decision-making and problem-solving, conflict resolution and technical training. Organizations that create work teams often underestimate the amount of training required to make teams effective. The mistake occurs frequently in successful organizations where managers assume that if employees can work effectively on their own, they can work effectively in teams.
In reality, organizations that successfully use teams provide thousands of hours of training to make sure that teams work. Interpersonal skills such as listening, communicating, questioning, and providing feedback that enable people to have effective working relationships with others. Because of teams'autonomy and responsibility, many companies also give team members training in decision-making and problem-solving skills to help them do a better job of cutting costs and improving quality of customer service.
Many organizations also teach team conflict resolution skills. Firms must also provide team members with the technical training they need to do their jobs, particularly if they're being cross-trained to perform all different jobs on the team. Thank you.