What Are the Strengths and Challenges of Teams at Work?
What are the strengths and challenges of teams at work?
Team work has been the biggest development in management of human resources for organizations in the past few decades (Mohrman, Cohen and Mohrman, 1995). It has been implemented in a wide variety of spheres and the growth of the popularity is still ongoing. It is obvious that these changes have not happened without a reason, there is something to team work that is attracting every manager like kids to an ice-cream car.
Before I continue, I want to state some things so there would not be any misunderstanding further on the essay. First, I do not want any confusion when it comes to defining a team and a group, because I understand that there is not much of a difference (Guzzo, 1996) between these terms. The only thing that I want to state is that team always has an interdependent nature; they perceive themselves as a whole unit. Second, as the topic is about teams in general, the evaluation is quite superficial and it will not be valid for every team. The way team preforms depends on the size of the team, the management of it and of course the working environment it is in. So every team has to be evaluated independently to give an objective report. I will describe aspects that stand out amongst the others and are present for most of the teams.
My goal in this essay is to evaluate teams at work environment drawing on theory and research. I am going to point out the strengths of a team-based work from member’s point of view and challenges that team members have to face. Eventually, what I am trying to state is that people (managers, leaders etc.) who are leaning towards team work as the best way of getting things done have made this assumption based on feelings they have towards team-work rather than researching theory and experiments made on the approach to get the bigger picture of what team-work consists from and what are the actual drawbacks. I am basing my work on the paper about ‘romance of teams’
Team work has been the biggest development in management of human resources for organizations in the past few decades (Mohrman, Cohen and Mohrman, 1995). It has been implemented in a wide variety of spheres and the growth of the popularity is still ongoing. It is obvious that these changes have not happened without a reason, there is something to team work that is attracting every manager like kids to an ice-cream car.
Before I continue, I want to state some things so there would not be any misunderstanding further on the essay. First, I do not want any confusion when it comes to defining a team and a group, because I understand that there is not much of a difference (Guzzo, 1996) between these terms. The only thing that I want to state is that team always has an interdependent nature; they perceive themselves as a whole unit. Second, as the topic is about teams in general, the evaluation is quite superficial and it will not be valid for every team. The way team preforms depends on the size of the team, the management of it and of course the working environment it is in. So every team has to be evaluated independently to give an objective report. I will describe aspects that stand out amongst the others and are present for most of the teams.
My goal in this essay is to evaluate teams at work environment drawing on theory and research. I am going to point out the strengths of a team-based work from member’s point of view and challenges that team members have to face. Eventually, what I am trying to state is that people (managers, leaders etc.) who are leaning towards team work as the best way of getting things done have made this assumption based on feelings they have towards team-work rather than researching theory and experiments made on the approach to get the bigger picture of what team-work consists from and what are the actual drawbacks. I am basing my work on the paper about ‘romance of teams’
References: Allen, N. J. (1996). Affective reactions to the group and the organization. In M. A. West (Ed.), Handbook of work group psychology (pp Allen, N. J., and Hecht, T. D. (2004). The romance of teams: Toward an understanding of its psychological underpinnings and implications. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 77(4), pp. 439–461. Bratton, J., Sawchuk, P., Forshaw, C., Callinan, M., and Corbett, M. (2010). Work and Organizational Behaviour Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, Hampshire. Carter, A. (2000). Sharing the burden: A study of teamwork and well–being in secondary health care teams Chenkul, A. (2009). Business dictionary. Available at: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/team.html. [Accessed: 1st January 2013] Diehl, M., and Stroebe, W Godard, J. (2001). High performance and the transformation of work: The implications of alternative work practices for the experience and outcomes of work Guzzo, R. A. (1996). Fundamental considerations about work groups. In M. A. West (Ed.), Handbook of work group psychology (pp Hogg, M. A., and Mullin, B. A. (1999). Joining groups to reduce uncertainty: Subjective uncertainty reduction and group identification. In D. Abrams & M. A. Hogg (Eds.), Social identity and social cognition (pp. 249–279). Oxford: Blackwell. Kooij-de Bode, H.J.M., van Knippenberg, D. and van Ginkel, W.P. (2008) ‘Ethnic diversity and distributed information in group decision making : the importance of information elaboration’, Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice, 12(4), pp. 307-320. Milgram, S. (1973), Obedience and Authority, London: Tavistock. Mohrman, S. A., Cohen, S. G., and Mohrman, A. M. (1995). Designing team-based organizations : New forms for knowledge work. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Paulus, P. B., Dzindolet, M. T., Poletes, G., & Camacho, L. M. (1993). Perception of performance in group brainstorming: The illusion of group productivity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, pp. 78–89. Schlenker, B. R., (1975). Group members’ attributions of responsibility for prior group performance