Teamwork: Types Of Teams, Roles, Pros And Cons Of Teamwork

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Introduction:

Familiar with the extraordinary Macintosh? The marvellous achievement of the apple brand has been lasting for generations. It all started with the synergy of two individuals, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Supporting each other and believing in what people though was ridicules. Moreover, Familiar with the success of google that began in 1995 and flourished to conquer success until today and becoming the largest monopolies in the world. What is worthy of mentioning is that Google is also the outcome of two individuals’ combined effort, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Therefore, the prime and most crucial principle of the most well-known achievements is the teamwork. Because teams are built based on debatable and complementary skills within the members, to ensure effective and efficient working process. Furthermore, teamwork is tightly associated with unity, and trust. According to Meriam Webster, team work is defined as the work done by several associates with each doing a part but all subordinating personal prominence to the efficiency of the whole. Also, it has been studied that the potential of team work is more innovative, successful, and promising for the fact that the group members have the opportunity to combine the effort on the design process. More specifically, the team have more room to discuss and brain storm more solutions and provide wider constructive feedback and advice on their business matter. Said by Andrew Carnegie, “Teamwork is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” Summing up that team work is the unlimited synergy of trusting team members reaching for outstanding outcome. However, the following paper will discuss teamwork in detail, team cohesiveness, and highlight advantages and disadvantages of teamwork.

Teamwork is described in phrases of team’s ability to show their abilities in problems that involves errors identification, coordinating with team members to find the causes of the errors, finding several solutions, implementing the best alternative, and then take the full responsibility of the outcomes as a team, not as a single member.

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Types of teams can be classified into 6 main types:

  • Functional Teams: All team members are linked to the same functional area, where they all respond to the same manager. This type is common in companies with solid hierarchies.

One advantage of functional teams is that they are managed by experienced manager/leader with high skills and ability to understand and revise the entire work.

A disadvantage of functional teams is that functional teams may not be able to communicate or socialize more often which will cause flexibility to decrease.

  • Inter-working Teams: All team members are from different areas of activities, and usually all members have the same hierarchal level. This type of teams are usually formed to develop work with multidisciplinary view.
  • Troubleshooting Teams: All members of the team are employed by the organization in order to improve process that allows the organization to find out how to solve the faced problems that are threatening the company.
  • Self-Managed Teams: All team members work in highly integrated and collaborative way because they do not have a formal manager/leader. Members divide the work, responsibilities, and tasks among themselves. As well as decision making is done by the members of the team, not by a higher management level.
  • Project Teams: All team members work together to implement specific project until completion, and then they get separated as soon as the goals and objectives are achieved.
  • Task Force Teams: Also called “Problem-Solving Teams” and they are the most interesting team. All members of the team are gathered when emergency situations occur and the organization needs to solve.
  • Virtual Teams: All members of the teams work inter-dependently towards the achievement of a common goal in certain period of time. They are distinguished by dependence on technology, absence of non-verbal cues, and group process recording.

Dr. Meredith Belbin is the researcher who found out that teams need the right combination of roles in order to be effective.

There are 9 roles mentioned in his research and each three were grouped together:

• Cerebral:

  1. Plant: Creative, Imaginative, unorthodox, and solves difficult problems. But he/she has some weakness like: ignore incidentals.
  2. Specialist: Single-minded, self-starting, dedicated, and one of their weaknesses are: Contributes only on a narrow front.
  3. Monitor Evaluator: Sober, strategic and discerning, and their weaknesses are: Lacks drive and ability to inspire others.

• Action-Oriented:

  1. Implementer: Turns ideas into practical actions, and their weaknesses are: Somewhat inflexible.
  2. Shaper: The drive and courage to overcome obstacles, and their weakness is: Offends people’s feelings.
  3. Completer Finisher: Searches out errors and omissions.

• People Oriented:

  1. Teamwork: Listens, builds, averts friction, and one of their weaknesses are: indecisive in crunch situations.
  2. Coordinator: Clarifies goals, promotes decision-making, delegates well, and one of their weaknesses are: Off loads personal work.
  3. Resources Investigator: Explores opportunities. Develops contacts, and one of their weaknesses are: Over-optimistic.

Teamwork is one of the most essential parts of success in an organization. The better the teamwork, the better is the chance of the organization for attaining success in the market. The need for successful teamwork has seen a steady and gradual rise in the last few years due to the globalization of the business world. The need and importance for teamwork has prompted the business organizations to find out the different attributes and features that determine teamwork. The following report is based on the analysis of a successful as well as an unsuccessful team and then finding out the positives and negatives of teamwork(Tarricone and Luca 2002)..

Pros of Teamwork

Some of the pros of teamwork are as follows;

  1. Team members are committed to the success of the team rather than the personal self. The success of the team is considered to be one of the pros of the teamwork
  2. Togetherness can be said to be as one of the most important attributes of teamwork. The moiré better the teamwork in an organization, the better will be the closeness and bonding within the business organization. A positive team has a strong interdependence amongst each other which helps them to attain business success
  3. Successful teamwork can help in the success of the team and also increase motivation and engagement among the team members. The increase in the motivational factors helps the organization as a motivated employee provides top class performance to the company
  4. Another major positive of teamwork in an organization is the presence of better and effective communication. The presence of an inter related communication amongst each other is ideal for the success of the business in the market

Cons of Teamwork

Similar to the positives of teamwork there are a number of negatives involved with a good teamwork. These negatives sometimes threaten the success of the organization in the market. The cons of teamwork are as follows;

  1. In a team, equality is very much important for success. In a team each and every member needs to be successful in order to ensure success. therefore the failure of only one member can easily compromise the success of the team as a whole
  2. Teams are often empowered to accomplish the tasks that are not available to individuals
  3. Some of the team members may deliberately underperform in order to ensure the failure of teamwork
  4. Teamwork can often lead to problems for the solo employee skills as some of the employees may prefer to showcase their individual brilliance which cannot be highlighted in the presence of teamwork

The discussion of the pros, and cons in the following report is one of the major studies in the recent times. The results from the following study indicate that the key factors and perspectives needs to be considered by the management of the organization in order to ensure success of the organization during teamwork.

Team Cohesiveness and Team Performance

The idea of cohesiveness is of central importance psychology of teams. Within the sense during which the term has recently return to be used, a certain minimum quantity of cohesiveness, or integrating force, is necessary for group to exist at all. Unless a crucial strength of force toward staying within the team applies to the members, the cluster can disrupt and stop to be. This total field of forces that acts on members to stay within the cluster is termed the cohesiveness of that team.

The relation between team cohesiveness and performance

Reports the results of meta-analytic integration of the relation between cluster cohesiveness and performance. Overall, the cohesive–performance result was extremely important and of small magnitude. The result was stronger in reciprocity studies than in experimental studies. The result was additionally stronger in smaller teams than in larger teams and stronger among real teams than among artificial teams. The cohesive–performance result is due primarily to commitment to task instead of social attraction or cluster pride. A meta-analytic cross-lagged panel correlation analysis urged that the foremost direct result could be from performance to cohesiveness instead of from cohesiveness to performance. Discussion considers the implications of those results for future analysis on cluster cohesiveness and performance

Example:

The effectiveness of sport groups in competition depends upon several factors, one among that is that the ability of individual members to figure along. The coach typically refers to the current ability as cooperation, togetherness, or morale, while the researcher refers to it as group integration or group cohesiveness. Physical educators and coaches alike have long postulated that the foremost effective team isn’t essentially composed from a combination of the most effective masterly people. the power of people to effec tively move with teammates to get a group-desired goal has been recognized as tributary to team effectiveness. a standard command assump- tion is that the upper the cohesiveness of a team the simpler it’ll be. the aim of the current study was to analyze this assumption among intramural basketball groups. the matter was to see if completely different levels of cluster cohesiveness affected the effectiveness and individual member satisfaction.

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