Groups and Teams Essays

The positive impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can contribute creativity to a high-performance team. Membership diversity offers a rich pool of information, talent, and varied perspectives that can help improve team problem solving and increase creativity (Hunt, J., Osborn, R., Schermerhorn, J., 2005). Cultural diversity contributes various group input and group dynamics to the team. These two factors are essential in the high performance of a team. Cultural diversity can develop a high-performance team by allowing the diverse potentials of a team to operate. The negative impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can develop numerous of conflicts between team members. Conflicting interaction can limit or decrease the effectiveness and efficiency of productivity. There should be an awareness of the diverse culture values in order to prevent these conflicts.

At this stage, the group begins to realize the more positive points of individuals within the group, which promotes the development of trust and respect which begins to build group cohesion. The next stage is the performing stage, which is typical of high-performing teams that are able to function as a group and figure out various options to get the job done smoothly and effectively without supervision. The final stage is the adjourning phase, which is the final step in completing tasks and breaking up the team.

Creating and managing effective teams in today’s work environment is much different than it was just a short time ago. With each generation of American workers come new ideas, rules, and methodologies that must be considered when developing an effective team. Some of the newer ideas may have been foreign to managers even ten years ago. An example of this is that many companies today are becoming more socially responsible. A recent article in Incentive states, “Social responsibility, it seems, is the new signing bonus” (Flanagan, p4, 2006). Rarely are managers given a

A team is something more than a collection of individuals. Teamwork is a group of people working together to achieve the same goal. The whole is more than a sum of the parts. A team can be identified by evidence of some or all of the following:

A team is a group of people working together in a related field to achieve an agreed goal, target or objective. In order to attain the overall goal activities and tasks are shared between the team members with give individuals their roles and responsibilities.

Teams are formed when individuals with a common taste, preference, liking, and attitude come and work together for a common goal. Teams play a very important role in organizations as well as our personal lives.

Teams are when people working together in a group to perform efforts and communicate with each other to combine efforts.

This stage sees group members begin to confront each other as they begin to vie for roles within the group that will help them to belong and to feel valued. Thus as members begin to assert their individual personalities, the comfort of the forming stage begins to come under siege. Members experience personal, intra and inter group conflicts. Aggression and resentment may manifest in this stage and thus if strong personalities emerge and leadership is unresponsive to group and individual needs, the situation may become destructive to the

Introduction: In the given statement "simply put, teams will be the primary building block of performance in the high performance organization of the future. As a result, effective top managers will increasingly worry about both performance and the teams that will help deliver it" (p. 239, The Wisdom of Teams). Authors Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith conversed with several individuals in more than thirty organizations to figure out where and how groups function best and how to upgrade their adequacy. They uncover: The most critical component in group success who exceeds expectations at group authority. Furthermore, why they are infrequently the most senior individuals Why company wide change relies on upon groups. Furthermore, more comprehensive and demonstrated compelling, The Wisdom of Teams is the fantastic first stage of making groups an effective apparatus for accomplishment in today 's worldwide commercial center.

Diversity is important to mitigate two threats to group effectiveness. First, the Asch Effect, distortion of individual judgement by a unanimous but incorrect opposition. (p. 290). Second, Group think, when in a cohesive in-group, members strive for unanimity and override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. (p. 292).

Teams are more than just groups of people assembled in the same area, they are a collection of individuals dedicated to a common purpose and with a series of detailed performance targets, working together with complementary skills. Teams of people are encountered in various scenarios, not just in the workplace, but also throughout life, such as sports, associations, charities and voluntary services.

In this paper I will discuss how a team/group can become a high-performance team/group, examine the demographic characteristics and culture diversity and the impact on the team/group behavior. I will also describe how demographic characteristics and cultural diversity contribute to or detract from high-performance groups or teams.

Diversity in culture and demographic characteristics can be a negative impact or be one of the team's greatest strengths, depending on how the team as a whole functions and applies these different “routes to success”. A group can become a high performing team by understanding how cultural and demographic differences influence group behavior. The groups must realize that they can benefit from their diversity to their advantage and into a high performance team.

The Tuckman Model of Group Development has 5 stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Adjourning (Maples, 2008). During the first session of MOP, everyone was tasked with forming their own small project team. The very first class workshop activity involved meeting two new people and introducing one of them to the entire class. The aim of the activity was to indirectly assess who we would want to be in a team with, based on our perceptions of a person’s behaviour, values, and work ethic. Most people would want to be in a team with people similar to them on a surface level (age, gender, ethnicity) and on a deeper level (personality, attitudes, believes, values) (Liang, Shih, & Chiang, 2015). We were free to choose whoever we wanted in our team under the condition that the team we form is diverse.

This about how to work with groups and other team members, most of the time it is hard to do but with our jobs nowadays we have to do what we have to do. I like working with others for the most part, especially when they are motivated in getting the job done in a timely manner. Then we have some that just don’t want to help but want everybody else to do their work for them.