Teams

This page covers team building aspects.

In today’s contemporary organizational context the concept of teams and teamwork has become an important key to productivity and every one is part of one or many teams. Many agree that the team environments improve productivity, morale and quality improvements.

The most common Tuckmann (1965) team development model identifies the team building steps as forming, storming, norming & performing stages. The attention stairway from McFadzean (2002) incorporates team dynamics, facilitator competence and problem solving techniques and further analyses team development.

McFadzean (2002) has identified a variety of variables that influence team productivity from a number of models on team effectiveness. These include personality characteristics, group size, reward structure, work norms, task characteristics, group structure, communication, conflict, information systems, status relationships, technological support and so on. Groups undertaking simple, well-structured tasks do not need to learn group dynamics, rather follow set procedures and guidelines. According to McFadzean (2002) when the task becomes complex, novel and ambiguous teams must develop skills so that they can utilise more powerful problem solving tools and techniques. She further explains that the team should consist of appropriate members with wide range of skills, abilities and experience.

It was mentioned by many authors that constructive behavior patterns improve team effectivity. The following table shows some constructive behavior patterns that can be harvested for better performance. (Adapted from Ishaya & Macaulay, 1999)

Dimensions	Behaviours
Integrity	Being honest, being straightforward, keeping promises, being faithful and true, timely response, being reliable
Ability	Demonstrating personal knowledge and competence, demonstrating individual and group skills, sharing individual experiences
Openness	Informing members, sharing ideas freely, giving feedback, apologising publicly
Benevolence	Being helpful, being supportive, being friendly, being humble, praising others
Expectations	Expressing one’s expectations, compromising on individual expectations, being fair in one’s expectations, being consistent

The main attentive areas in the team were found as personal qualities, task and feelings by the author.

• Personal qualities: Building up personal qualities (mentioned above) showed process gains and reduced process losses. This also improved communication and team integrity.
• Task: Task definition, clarity and ownership provided the team to work in order and reduce confusion. This also allowed the team to create identity within the team.
• Feelings: This allowed the team to build up awareness and better understanding empowering team cohesiveness.
(Delpagoda.T, 2007)

References

Delpagoda, T (2007) Facilitation methodology to effectively support virtual IT project teams submitted to the University of Liverpool

Ishaya, T and Macaulay, L. (1999) "The role or trust in virtual teams" published in "Organizational Virtual ness and Electronic Commerce" eJOV (Vol 1, No. 1) ISSN: 1422-9331

McFadzean, E. (2002a). “Developing and supporting creative problem-solving teams: part1 - a conceptual model”, Management Decision – MCB UP limited

Tuckman, Bruce. (1965). “Developmental sequence in small groups.”, Psychological bulletin, 63, 384-399

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