Teams

INTRODUCTION

The statement, ‘teams can be extremely powerful when they work well, but transforming a group of individuals into a team can be hard work,’ would be more correct if it said, ‘teams are extremely powerful when they work well, but transforming a group of individuals into an effective team is hard work.’ This assignment will attempt to explain that transforming a group of individuals into an effective team is hard work. This will be done by discussing, debating and analysing the first statement. In order to do this I will: define what a team is; discuss powerful teams; distinguish between teams and workgroups; talk about the types of teams that exist; evaluate the development and process of teams; analyse several components of what an effective team is and discuss things that can go wrong in the teambuilding process.

TEAMS DEFINED

Katzenbach and Smith (1993, p. 45) offers a very similar definition as to what a team is, compared to, Wood et al. (2004, p 311)‘A small number of people with complimentary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.’(Katzenbach and Smith 1993, p. 45) In other words, a team, is a small group of individuals that are working together to achieve a common outcome, these individuals will also posses complimentary skills. For example, suppose that the CEO of Coca-Cola came to the conclusion that the companies beverage sales would rise if they had a more diverse offering of beverages. The individuals responsible for researching the type of beverages to be launched by Coca-Cola to increase sales would be called a team. These researchers would have a common purpose, performance goals and complimentary skills making them a team. For this example a successful team would develop new products that lead to a rise in beverage sales.

POWERFUL TEAMS

To understand what is meant by the statement, ‘Teams can be extremely powerful when they work well,’ we need to understand what is meant by the word, power. Krebs (1994) defines power as the, ‘ability to do or act.’ Applying this definition of power in relation to teams, you could assume that a powerful team is a team that is operating effectively. A team that is working well is a team that is operating effectively, surely for a team to be effective it also has the ‘ability to do or act.’ Stating that, ‘teams can be extremely powerful when they work well’ would mean that some teams can work well and not be extremely powerful. If power means the ability to act or do, than the statement would also be implying that a team working well might not be able to act or do.

TEAMS VS WORKGROUPS

It is important to distinguish that there is a difference between workgroups and teams. Tjosvold, Smith and West (2005) explain that a workgroup is different to a team because ‘there is no significant incremental performance need or opportunity that would require it to become a team. The members interact primarily to share information, best practices, or perspectives and to make decisions to help each individual perform within his or her area of responsibility. Beyond that there is no realistic or truly desired ‘small group’ common purpose, incremental performance goals, or joint work-products that call for either a team approach or mutual accountability.’ In other words a team functions as a unit to achieve a common goal whereas a group is a number of individuals that come together to achieve a common purpose. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) add to this definition by stating that workgroups have a strong and clearly focused leader and that the individuals are accountable for the outcome. This differs from a team, which has shared leadership and a mixture of individual and mutual accountability.

TYPES OF TEAMS

Within the broad definition of what a team is there are several different types of teams that exist. Parker (2002) defines functional, self-directed and cross-functional as the different types of teams. Wood et al. (2004) calls them autonomous work, self-managing and virtual teams. In functional or autonomous work teams are give large amounts of authority and responsibility and are best suited to stable slow-growth industries. Self-directed or managing teams have small groups of individuals that are empowered to make their own decisions and are used in the same industries as functional teams and many others usually companies with a high level of employee involvement. An individual within cross-functional or virtual teams work interdependently to achieve a common goal. A cross-functional team operates in fast-changing environments, for example the fashion industry. (Parker 2002, p