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The Four Stages Of Cohesiveness

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It is widely view by academics that when there is strong teamwork with high cohesiveness, it adds competitive advantage to an organization. Cohesiveness was defined as “a dynamic process that is reflected in the tendency for a group to stick together and remain united in the pursuit of its instrumental objectives and/or for the satisfaction of member affective needs” (Carron, Brawley, & Widmeyer, 1998, p. 213). Tuckman (1965) theorise that there are four stages in team development; forming, storming, norming and performing. From the four stages, it is believed that the forming, storming and norming stages lead the team to self-develop cohesiveness. Once the team is able to get together, they would then be able to focus their attention on performing …show more content…

They were (1) planned, (2) facilitated by an outside consultant, (3) engaged in by intact workgroups, (4) designed to develop the problem-solving capability of the crews, and (5) intended to solve major problems” (p. 311). Planned would be the list of things that the participants need to achieve during the team-building activities. A 3rd party consultant or event organizer would be engaged by an organization to provide training to its employees. The trainer will need to plan and execute the activities to only the specific group of employees as requested by the organization. The training package would be tailored and help employees develop problem solving skills to address issues faced by the organization. Synergy as described by Scarnati (2001) is “a process of interaction where 2 + 2 = 10. It is a magnifying effect of each component in which the whole surpasses the sum of the parts” (p. 6). When team members can contribute effectively together, it can result in a direct and indirect multiplied effect to the issues they wish to tackle. Team building can be described as a continuous learning process and should not be a one-time activity. The idea is to assist the team to function effectively through on-going process of self-evaluation and consciousness. However, some managers were pessimistic about any positive effects from team building. They have experienced that in some team building activities, the debriefing session turned out to be finger pointing, focus on mistakes rather than improvement. Team building becomes a backlash on creating synergy, and performance actually decreased instead of becoming better (Dyer & Dyer, 2013, p. 23). Klein et al. (2009) has three thoughts about team building. Firstly, they think that there is insufficient proof whether team building in general is effective in the first place. Second, team building may not be specific enough

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