TEAM DYNAMICS:Stages of Group Development, Problem-Solving Teams, Benefits of Teams

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Leadership & Team Management MGMT 623

Lesson 26

TEAM DYNAMICS

Team: A team is a formal work group in which there is a high level of interaction and interdependence

among group members who work intensely together to achieve a common goal.

Teamwork: is the process of people actively working together to accomplish common goals.

Advantages and disadvantages of having team.

Advantages

Disadvantages

Blocking

Wider range of knowledge, expertise and

Dominant people

ideas

Status differential

Effective way to build consensus

Groupthink

Effective way to communicate complex

information

Why Rely on Teams: Compared with individuals working alone, teams tend to make better decisions

and make better products and services due to more knowledge and expertise. Organizations have turned

to teams to better utilize employee talents.

Management is looking for that positive synergy that will allow their organizations to increase

performance. The extensive use of teams creates the potential for an organization to generate greater

outputs with no increase in inputs. Merely calling a group a team doesn't automatically increase its

performance. We need to convert those groups into team.

How Do We Measure Team Effectiveness? Effective teams have confidence in themselves and

believe they can succeed--this is team efficacy. Success breeds success. Management can increase

team efficacy by helping the team to achieve small successes and skill training.

Small successes build team confidence. The greater the abilities of team members, more the likelihood

that the team will develop confidence and the capability to deliver that confidence. We can measure the

team effectiveness by measuring their...

o Productivity

o Cohesion

o Learning/ growth & development

o Integration with the rest of the organization.

Stages of Group Development:

Forming--group members gather and try to get to know each other and establish a common

understanding as they struggle to clarify group goals and determine appropriate behavior within the

group. Initial entry of members to a group/team.

Members concern does include:

Getting to know each other.

Discovering what is considered acceptable behavior.

Determining the group's real task.

Defining group rules.

Questions about purpose

Approach - avoidance behavior

High drop out possibility

Members seek leadership

Non-intimate relations

Storming--characterized by considerable conflict--group members resist being controlled by the

group and disagrees about who should lead the group and how to achieve the objectives or how

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much power the leader should have. This is the startup stage after group is formed. Every body

gives his or her suggestion. A period of high emotionality and tension among group members.

Members concern's include:

· Dealing with outside demands.

· Clarifying membership expectations.

· Dealing with obstacles to group goals.

· Understanding members' interpersonal styles.

· Members test others strength

· Authority in group tested

· Fluid status structure

· Member ejection may occur

Norming--group members really start to feel that they belong to the group, and they develop close

ties with one another and start coming to points where most of the member agree and they feel of

wiliness to move forward. The point at which the group really begins to come together as a

coordinated unit. Members concern's include:

· Holding the group together.

· Dealing with divergent views and criticisms.

· Dealing with a premature sense of accomplishment.

· Intensified, interpersonal involvement

· Desire for group attention

· Member interdependence

· Dependence on the leader

· Increased trust

· Well established norms

· Rules, roles, standards

· Growing capacity to plan

Performing--the group is ready to tackle group tasks and work toward achieving group goals, they

actually start performing--the real work gets accomplished in this stage. Marks the emergence of a

mature, organized, and well-functioning team. Members deal with complex tasks and handle

internal disagreements in creative ways.

Primary challenge is to continue to improve relationships and performance.

· Sense that "our" group is special

· Acceptance of individual differences

· People can be themselves

· Disagreement/conflict is OK

· Structure, roles, norms established and accepted

· Teamwork utilizes the diverse strength of the members

Adjourning: For temporary committees, teams, task forces, and similar groups that have a limited

task to perform. After completing the task and they reach adjourning stage. In this stage, the group

prepares for its disbandment. Attention is directed toward wrapping up activities. Responses of

group members vary in this stage. Some are upbeat, basking in the group's accomplishments.

Others may be depressed over the loss of camaraderie and friendships. Particularly important for

temporary groups/teams.

A well-integrated group/team is:

Able to disband when its work is finished.

Willing to work together in the future.

Celebrate individual/ collective accomplishments

Similarly others also describe these group formation stages in different ways but the basis were almost

the similar.

Like in one classification they describe them as bellow.

o Orientation (Forming)

o Dissatisfaction (Storming)

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o Resolution (Norming)

o Production (Performing)

o Termination (in the case of temporary groups)

How individual and group behave and issue during these development stages is summarized as bellow.

Types of Teams:

Project Team:

o Is convened for a specific purpose and disbands after completing its task.

Problem-Solving Teams

o Twenty years ago, teams were just beginning to grow in popularity and most took similar form.

They are typically composed of 512 hourly employees from the same department who met for

a few hours each week to discuss ways of improving quality, efficiency, and the work

environment.

o Members share ideas or offer suggestions on how work processes and methods can be

improved. Rarely are they given the authority to unilaterally implement their suggested actions.

o One of the most widely practiced applications during the 1980s was quality circles.

Self-Managed Work Teams

o Problem-solving teams did not go far enough in getting employees involved in work-related

decisions and processes. This led to experimentation with truly autonomous teams.

o These groups of employees (typically 1015 in number) perform highly related or

interdependent jobs and take on many of the responsibilities of their former supervisors.

o This includes planning and scheduling of work, assigning tasks to members, collective control

over the pace of work, making operating decisions, and taking action on problems.

o Fully self-managed work teams even select their own members and have the members evaluate

each other's performance. As a result supervisory roles become less important.

o Business periodicals documented successful applications of self-managed teams. In spite of

these impressive stories, a word of caution:

Some organizations have been disappointed with the results from self-managed teams.

Teams do not seem to work well during organizational downsizing.

The overall research on the effectiveness of self-managed work teams has not been

uniformly positive.

Moreover, while individuals on teams do tend to report higher levels of job satisfaction,

they also sometimes have higher absenteeism and turnover rates.

The effectiveness of self-managed teams is situationally dependent.

Care needs to be taken when introducing self-managed teams globally.

Cross-Functional Teams

o These are teams made up of employees from about the same hierarchical level, but from

different work areas, who come together to accomplish a task.

Many organizations have used horizontal, boundary-spanning groups for years.

IBM created a large task force in the 1960s--made up of employees from across

departments in the company--to develop the highly successful System 360.

o A task force is really nothing other than a temporary cross-functional team.

o The popularity of cross-discipline work teams exploded in the late 1980s.

o Cross-functional teams are challenging to manage.

Virtual Teams

o The previous types of teams do their work face to face. Virtual teams use computer

technology to tie together physically dispersed members in order to achieve a common

goal.

They allow people to collaborate online.

Virtual teams can do all the things that other teams do.

They can include members from the same organization or link an organization's

members with employees from other organizations.

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They can convene for a few days to solve a problem, a few months to complete a

project, or exist permanently.

o The three primary factors that differentiate virtual teams:

The absence of verbal and nonverbal cues. These help clarify communication by

providing increased meaning, but aren't available in online interactions.

Limited social context. Virtual teams often suffer from less social rapport and less

direct interaction among members.

The ability to overcome time and space constraints. Virtual teams allow people to work

together who might otherwise never be able to collaborate.

We can summarize this as shown in slides during our lecture as bellow.

Project Team: is convened for a specific purpose and disbands after completing its task.

Cross-functional Team: operates with members who come from different functional units

of an organization

Quality Circle Team: employees who meet periodically to discuss ways of improving

work quality. - a group of workers from the same functional area who meet regularly to

uncover and solve work-related problems and seek work improvement opportunities.

Self-Managing Teams: work team having the authority to make decisions about how they

share and complete their work.

Virtual Teams: Work together and solve problems through computer based interactions

We cam also divide teams into permanent or Temporary Teams.

Permanent teams:

o Team-based departments

o Team-based organization

o Quality circles

Temporary teams:

A task force is a collection of people who come together to accomplish a specific goal.

Once the goal has been accomplished, the task force is usually disbanded.

Temporary teams are to solve problem. A standing committee or task groups are task forces that may be

enduring (though members may change) or permanent in nature.

Benefits of Teams:

o Synergy (a type of process gain) occurs when members of a group/teams working / acting

together are able to produce more or better output than would have been produced by the

combined efforts of each person acting alone.

Why Teams Are Good for Organizations

o More resources for problem solving

o Improved creativity and innovation

o Improved quality of decision making

o Greater commitments to tasks

o Increased motivation of members

o Better control and work discipline

o More individual need satisfaction

Characteristics of High Performance Teams:

o Clear goals

o Results-driven structure

o Competent team members

o Unified commitments

o Collaborative climate

o Standards of excellence

o Leadership

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