Teamwork

Teamwork



Teamwork

Q1. Critical approaches to understanding organisations tend to take a significantly more questioning view of what have become accepted and taken for granted organisational practices. Using appropriate theory and your experience and/or observations of organisations critically evaluate the role of Teamwork within contemporary organisations.

Teams are social entities that come together to perform complex, dynamic, and critical tasks that are beyond the capabilities of an individual. Teams are now part of every aspect of organizational life. They are prevalent in government, the military, health care, aviation and space, the corporate world, the oil industry, and manufacturing, to name just a few settings. Teams are deployed to solve organizational effectiveness problems, to deal with life-or-death situations, to create new products, to resolve world conflicts as peace keepers, to put out wildfires, and to rescue people during natural disasters.

Indeed, teams are an integral part of our society. Nonetheless, questions remain about teams: What are teams? How are they different from groups? What is teamwork? What do we know about team dynamics? What do effective teams do? These questions are answered in this entry.

Some important definitions are needed to understand team dynamics in organizations. First, a team can be defined as a set of two or more individuals who adaptively, episodically, and dynamically interact interdependently through specified roles and responsibilities as they work toward shared and valued goals. Team member interdependency (i.e., task interdependency) is a critical feature of a team and distinguishes a group of individuals from a team. Although this distinction might seem academic, it highlights that teams and groups are not the same. Teams and groups have different organizational and leadership structure, goals, communication requirements, life spans, and task intensity. Team members usually have a past and a future together. In contrast, group members (e.g., people who participate on juries, councils, task forces, brainstorming groups) usually have limited time together and nothing to tie them together other than a particular task at one particular time.

In addition, because they contain specific roles, teams can often be characterized as having distributed expertise. That is, team members often have different specializations in which teammates hold different information about the task and possess different knowledge and skills. In fact, it is this diversity of expertise that creates the synergy for teams to complete work outside the scope of any one individual's capabilities. And the dynamics of effective teamwork are necessary to realize this synergy.

What is teamwork? Teamwork is the dynamic, simultaneous, and recursive enactment of behavioral, attitudinal, and cognitive mechanisms (in the form of team processes) that affect moment-to-moment actions and performance outcomes. Teamwork, then, is a set of interrelated, adaptable, and flexible cognitions, behaviors, and attitudes needed to achieve desired team goals. One can argue that teams “think,” “do,” and “feel” as they perform and execute their interdependent tasks. These cognitions, behaviors, and attitudes represent the team-level competencies (i.e., the knowledge, skills, and attitudes, or KSAs) that members need in order to execute effective team functions and achieve performance greater than that predicted ...