Teams and Groups

Teamwork is essential for competing in today's global arena, where individual perfection is not as desirable as a high level of collective performance. In knowledge based enterprises, teams are the norm rather than the exception. A critical feature of these team is that they have a significant degree of empowerment, or decision-making authority. There are many different kinds of teams: top management teams, focused task forces, self-directed teams, concurrent engineering teams, product/service development and/or launch teams, quality improvement teams, and so on. Not all groups in organizations are teams, but all teams are groups. The difference between a team and a group is that a team is interdependent for overall performance. A group qualifies as a team only if its members focus on helping one another to accomplish organizational objectives. In today's quickly changing business environment, teams have emerged as a requirement for business success. Therefore you should constantly try to help groups become teams and facilitate the evolution of groups into teams.

In the new era of systemic innovation, it is more important for an organization to be cross-functionally excellent than functionally excellent. Firms which are successful in realizing the full returns from their technologies and innovations are able to match their technological developments with complementary expertise in other areas of their business, such as manufacturing, distribution, human resources, marketing, and customer relationships. To lead these expertise development efforts, cross-functional teams, either formal or informal, need to be formed. These teams can also find new businesses in white spaces between existing business units.

At General Electric (GE), Jack Welch required all managers should learn to become team players and coaches. He also took steps against those managers who wouldn't learn to become team players by cutting the bottom 10% every year. "One of the surest ways to raise the level of a team is to cut from the bottom and add to the top," advised Welch. Cultural differences in multicultural teams can create misunderstandings between team members before they have had a chance to establish any credibility with each other. Thus, building trust is a critical step in creation and development of such teams. As a manager of a multicultural team, you need to recognize that building trust between different people is a complex process, since each culture has its own way of building trust and its own interpretation of what trust is.

When a new recruit enters an organization for the first time, he or she is confronted with an ordered system. The organization has work to do, jobs and a structure have been created to do the work, and people have been brought into the organization to do those jobs. While some individuals can remain independent in their completion of the work assigned to them, usually people are either formed into groups or form themselves into groups. Small groups do much of the world’s work. Almost without doubt, everyone will find themselves at some point in life as the member of a work group. Furthermore, people want to be in a group. The need to belong is a basic human need.

Work group effectiveness is composed of three parts. The first is the performance of the group as rated