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Basic
Team Working
What
is a team anyway?
-A team is a small number of people with
complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance
goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable
-Small Number
-Complementary Skills
-Common Purpose & Performance Goals
-Common Approach
-Mutual Accountability
Ten
common teaming problems
-Floundering
-Overbearing participants
-Dominating participants
-Reluctant participants
-Unquestioned acceptance of opinions as facts
-Rush to accomplishment
-Attribution
-Discounts and "plops"
-Wanderlust: digression and tangents
-Feuding members
Five issues to be considered in team building
1. Interdependence
This is the issue of how each member's outcomes are determined,
at least in part, by the actions of the other members. The structure
of the team task should be such that it requires cooperative interdependence.
Functioning independently of other team members, or competing with
them should lead to sub optimal outcomes for the entire team. Tasks
that require the successful performance of sub tasks by all team
members are called divisible, conjunctive tasks.
2. Goal Specification
It is very important for team members to have common goals for team
achievement, as well as to communicate clearly about individual
goals they may have. The process of clarifying goals may well engage
all of the issues on this list. Indeed, shared goals is one of the
definitional properties of the concept "team." A simple,
but useful, team building task is to assign a newly formed team
the task of producing a mission and goals statement.
3. Cohesiveness
This term refers to the attractiveness of team membership. Teams
are cohesive to the extent that membership in them is positively
valued; members are drawn toward the team. In task oriented teams
the concept can be differentiated into two sub concepts, social
cohesiveness and task cohesiveness. Social cohesiveness refers to
the bonds of interpersonal attraction that link team members. Although
a high level of social cohesiveness may make team life more pleasant,
it is not highly related to team performance. Nevertheless, the
patterns of interpersonal attraction within a team are a very prominent
concern. Team building exercises that have a component of fun or
play are useful in allowing attraction bonds to develop. Task cohesiveness
refers to the way in which skills and abilities of the team members
mesh to allow effective performance.
4. Roles and
Norms
All teams develop a set of roles and norms over time. In task oriented
teams, it is essential that the role structure enables the team
to cope effectively with the requirements of the task. When the
task is divisible and conjunctive, as are most of the important
team tasks in our society, the assignment of roles to members who
can perform them effectively is essential. Active consideration
of the role structure can be an important part of a team building
exercise. Task roles may be rotated so that all team members experience,
and learn from, all roles. Even then, it is important that the norm
governing the assignment of roles is understood and accepted by
team members.
Norms are the rules governing the behavior of team members, and
include the rewards for behaving in accord with normative requirements,
as well as the sanctions for norm violations. Norms will develop
in a team, whether or not they are actively discussed.
5. Communication
Effective interpersonal communication is vital to the smooth functioning
of any task team. There are many ways of facilitating the learning
of effective communication skills. Active listening exercises, practice
in giving and receiving feedback, practice in checking for comprehension
of verbal messages, are all aimed at developing skills. It is also
important for a team to develop an effective communication network;
who communicates to whom; is there anybody "out of the loop?"
Norms will develop governing communication. Do those norms encourage
everyone to participate, or do they allow one or two dominant members
to claim all the "air time?"
(From
Scholtes, Peter R., The Team Handbook, Joiner Associates (1988))
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