Teaming and Leading
Team
A team is a cohesive unit of people who enjoy the privileges of making decisions and continuously work to improve the organization. The team helps to align the organization around the functions and has the ability to work toward a common vision. As rightly quoted by Katzenbach and Smith,1993,”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 are mutually accountable."
Team Composition
Most big firms are actually promoting heterogeneity in their workplace teams. Like Goldman Sachs says in this advertisement The good news is great minds don't think alike. ... we believe the best ideas come from a room full of differing opinions. With our substantial global resources, we're able to bring different minds and disciplines to the table. The result is out of the box thinking instead of conventional solutions [The Economist February 2000].
Forming heterogeneous work units in organizations seems to make some sense. In a heterogeneous work group members have significantly different backgrounds and experiences. Examples of differences might be demographic characteristics, such as age or sex; social background, including class and ethnic origin; or professional development, such as education and organizational tenure. Hoffman and Maier (1961) note that heterogeneity of backgrounds and experiences allow a group to draw on very different sources of information and enables it to identify superior alternatives in the decision process.
However one might face problems in building such teams. If the company handles the problems carelessly, team effectiveness will drop dramatically. The first problem concerns language barriers. The second problem associated with heterogeneous teams is culture shock. In the multi-culture work environment, co-workers often misunderstand each other’s behaviour. The third problem with heterogeneous teams
A team is a cohesive unit of people who enjoy the privileges of making decisions and continuously work to improve the organization. The team helps to align the organization around the functions and has the ability to work toward a common vision. As rightly quoted by Katzenbach and Smith,1993,”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 are mutually accountable."
Team Composition
Most big firms are actually promoting heterogeneity in their workplace teams. Like Goldman Sachs says in this advertisement The good news is great minds don't think alike. ... we believe the best ideas come from a room full of differing opinions. With our substantial global resources, we're able to bring different minds and disciplines to the table. The result is out of the box thinking instead of conventional solutions [The Economist February 2000].
Forming heterogeneous work units in organizations seems to make some sense. In a heterogeneous work group members have significantly different backgrounds and experiences. Examples of differences might be demographic characteristics, such as age or sex; social background, including class and ethnic origin; or professional development, such as education and organizational tenure. Hoffman and Maier (1961) note that heterogeneity of backgrounds and experiences allow a group to draw on very different sources of information and enables it to identify superior alternatives in the decision process.
However one might face problems in building such teams. If the company handles the problems carelessly, team effectiveness will drop dramatically. The first problem concerns language barriers. The second problem associated with heterogeneous teams is culture shock. In the multi-culture work environment, co-workers often misunderstand each other’s behaviour. The third problem with heterogeneous teams