TEAM MANAGEMENT

Team Management

Team Management

Introduction

The trend of introducing teams to workplace has evolved and introduced a major shift, in workplaces, from working individually to working in diverse and multicultural teams. Multicultural teams are a result of companies having global work environments at an increasing rate. The basic team dynamic is that employees share information, accept each other's differences, cooperate with each other and work towards attaining the group goals and objective to achieve effective organizational productivity and performance. Dealing with teams is one of the most important aspects of managing a thriving firm on the basis of market share as well as employee retention in the long run. Multicultural teams bring into any organization diversity in terms of ideas, talents, knowledge, skills and abilities primarily through the different cultural backgrounds and differing perspectives of diverse team members on the world.

Discussion

Today's Workgroup and Teams

A work groups or team is defined to generate synergy that is positive through the incorporation of coordinated efforts. The individual efforts results in a level of performance that is greater than the sum of those individual inputs. Teams can do a wide variety of tasks that can be accomplished effectively by coordination and cooperation. They can make products, coordinate projects, offer advice, make decisions and negotiate deals. Diversity is the emblem of today's work groups and teams. A multicultural team is diverse because it is made up of employees with different working methods, communication styles, their distinct perceptions of success as well as differing decision-making styles. Managing employee diversity effectively is one of the most important employee management practices.

The four most common types of teams are: problem-solving teams, self-managed work teams, virtual teams and cross-functional teams. Problem solving basically denote the group that comprises 5 to 12 employees working from the similar department who meet for a few hours each week for discussing and analysing ways of improving quality, efficiency and the work environment. Self -managed group teams are the groups of 10 to 15 employees who have to take on job responsibilities of their former manager and supervisors. Basically, they are also known as self- directed team as employees in this team work together in their own peculiar style towards achieving common organizational goals and objectives. Cross-functional teams are the teams that include experts in and outside the organization from different business functions in the organization comprising of marketing, finance, human resources as well as operations department. They work towards the similar organizational objective, much like the self-managed teams. Virtual teams are the teams that exist across different time zones.

Team Dynamics and Communications

The team dynamics are essential for managing a team. There is a basic assumption that the challenges in managing teams arise primarily from the different styles of communications. It has been proven by many researchers that communication is one of the most significant factors that create obstacles in the success of team dynamics. The two basic categories of communications that affect team dynamics are direct and indirect ...