Why Team And Teamwork Come Up With Better Solution

Teams are an integral component of organizational success. They take on many forms and functions and can have various structures. Teams also conduct a wide variety of projects with goals of innovation or mitigation. An example, from my experience, of a project that required the execution from a team was the establishment of a finished goods inventory program within a paper manufacturing company. A project of this magnitude required that a diverse and multifaceted team be assembled.

Katzenbach and Smith (1993a) recognise teams as the basic units of performance in organisations and identify a team as '...a small number of people with complimentary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.'

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:

According to the video, the characteristics of an effective team are, “size of the team, diversity of its members, and roles. Teams of seven or less are generally more effective. Smaller teams: reach agreement, share opinions, and ask more questions. Larger teams: disagreements, less participation, and more demands on the team leader. Successful teams require a diversity of knowledge, skills, perspectives, and experience.” (Chapter 18 Teamwork at Cold Stone Creamery)

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.

“A team is not a bunch of people with job titles, but a congregation of individuals, each of whom has a role which is understood by other members.

As it is being stated earlier that this paper will be discussing about team development and it will then explain the theories of teamwork and team development. Team development is defined as the improvement of the efficacy of working in teams or groups by advancing goal progressions (Eyre, 2015). Bruce Tuckman firstly identified the four stages of team development in the mid 60s (Eyre, 2015). These stages are; Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. In the 1970s Dr Bruce Tuckman added the fifth stage, which is Adjourning (Businessballs.com, 2015). Dr Bruce also mentioned that this theory is a helpful and beneficial description of team development (Businessballs.com, 2015).

What is a team work? Team work can be defined as when actions of individuals are brought together for the purpose of a common goal. Each person in a team puts his efforts to achieve the objectives of large group. Teams make efforts to achieve the success but not necessarily the success is achieved every time. Within a team every member plays a role to achieve the team’s objectives. These roles add new and important dimensions to interactions of team members. Bruce Tuckman’s team development theory provides a way to tackle the tasks of making a team through the completion of the project. On the part of the team every member played an important role to achieve the success at

We can define team as a group of individuals who are working together (not necessarily present physically at a common place) to achieve a common goal and thereby benefits for an organization through collaborative decision making. The successful team cannot be established until they have clear vision (Lewis, 2006) . According to Hackman following are the characteristics of a team:

Just because an organization has employees does not mean they will function together as a team. To be a team requires that the team members enjoy working together and does so cohesively, productively, and efficiently. The successful team is cohesive because team members work together and share common goals and resources. Production doesn’t mean the team members never disagree, but they know how to work through conflicts and resolve conflicts together. The team is efficient because tasks are assigned in a way that takes into account each member’s strengths and weaknesses.

To fully discuss this topic, we must start with a simple definition of a team. Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith define a team in their best-selling book The Wisdom of Teams (Harper Business Essentials 1994), as

Team work and team effectiveness are very crucial for the success of any organization. In order to understand their implications in any organization, it is imperative to first understand the meaning of the term ‘team’. A team can be defined as a set of different people with different skills and different individual goals but working towards a common organizational goal (Kozolwski & Bell, 2003). Team work can be defined as the process when people from different backgrounds but interdependent in tasks work together collaboratively as a group (Benoliel & Somech, 2014). Furthermore, the team effectiveness can be defined as the capacity of the team to accomplish the objectives administered environment in an organization (Baiden & Price, 2011).

Researchers present many interpretations towards defining a team. According to Brooks (2009), he claimed that “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 hold themselves mutually accountable”. Meanwhile, Marquardt and Horvath (2001) and Bailey and Cohen (1997) clarified it as “a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems, and who manage their relationships across organizational boundaries and beyond”.

Salas, Dickinson, Converse and Tannenbaum (1992) stated a good definition of 'team ' as; A distinguishable set of two or more people interact, interdependently towards the common goal and mission, and have been assigned unique and specified role to perform, and who got a limited life span of membership. This refers to a higher interdependency among team members. This interdependence needs communication and harmonization among its members to achieve team goals. Thus, the success of team requires appropriate individual member contribution and best way in which these contributions combined into team response. (Hinsz, Tindale, & Vollrath, 1997)

Teamwork is the number of people who work together to achieve a goal, which they have rules and a clear working mechanism and interdependent with each other (Andrzej and David 2013). In general, there are five stages in the evolution of a team including forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning (Tuckman and Jensen as cited in Andrzej and David 2013). First, the group experiences the forming stage when the lecture appointed all members to join in a team. We chose the leader to set out the goal and task