Download Work Teams - Assignment Point

Work Teams
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
1
Why Have Teams Become So Popular?
Management has found that teams are more flexible
and responsive to changing events than are
traditional departments or other forms of permanent
groupings.
 Teams have the capability to quickly assemble,
deploy, refocus and disband.
 Following are the reasons of team becoming popular:
 Performance on complex tasks
 Utilization of employee talents
 Flexibility and responsiveness
 Motivational properties

Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
2
Work Groups and Work Teams
 Groups and Teams are not the same thing.
 Group: A work group is a group that interacts
primarily to share information and to make
decisions to help each member perform
within his or her area of responsibility.
 Work group has no need or opportunity to
engage in collective work that requires joint
effort. So, their performance is merely the
summation of each group member’s
individual contribution. There is no positive
synergy.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
3
Work Groups and Work Teams (Contd.)
 Team: A work generates positive synergy through
coordinated effort. Their individual efforts result in a
level of performance that is greater than the sum of
those individual’s inputs.
 The extensive use of teams creates the potential for
an organization to generate greater outputs with no
increase in inputs.
 Merely calling a group a team does not automatically
increase its performance. Effective teams have
certain common characteristics.
 If management hopes to gain increases in
organizational performance through the use of teams,
it will need to ensure that its teams possesses these
characteristics.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
4
Comparing Work Groups and Work Teams
Work Groups
Share information
Neutral (may be negative)
Individual
Random and varied
Work Teams
Goal
Synergy
Accountability
Skills
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
Collective performance
Positive
Individual and mutual
Complementary
5
Types of Teams
ProblemSolving
SelfManaged
Types of
Teams
CrossFunctional
Virtual
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
6
Types of Teams
 Team can do a variety of things. They can make
products, provide services, negotiate deals,
coordinate projects, offer advice and make decisions.
We shall describe four most common types of teams
likely to find in an organization. They are:
 Problem-Solving Teams: Groups of 5 to 12
employees from the same department who meet for a
few hours each week to discuss ways of improving
quality, efficiency and the work environment.
 Here members share ideas or offer suggestions on
how work processes and methods can be improved;
although they rarely have authority to unilaterally
implement any of their suggested actions.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
7
Types of Teams (Contd.)
 Self-Managed Work Teams: Are groups of
employees (typically 10 t0 15 in number) who
perform highly related or interdependent jobs and
take on many of the responsibilities of their former
supervisors.
 Typically, this includes planning and scheduling of
work, assigning task to members, collective control
over the pace of work, making operating decision,
taking action on problems and working with suppliers
and customers.
 Fully self-managed work team even select their
members, evaluate each others performance.
 A truly autonomous self-managed work team could
not only solve problems
but byimplement
solutions and 8
Organizational Behavior
A.K.M Musa
take full responsibility for outcomes.
Types of Teams (Contd.)
 Cross-Functional Teams: Employees from about
the same hierarchical level, but from different work
areas, who come together to accomplish a task.
 A task force is nothing but a temporary crossfunctional team. Committees composed of members
from across departmental lines are another example.
 These teams are an effective means for allowing
people from diverse areas within an organization (or
even between organizations) to exchange
information, develop new ideas and solve problems
and coordinate complex projects.
 It takes time to build trust and team work, especially
among people from different backgrounds with
different experiences and perspectives.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
9
Types of Teams (Contd.)
 Virtual Teams: All other teams do their works face-
to-face. Virtual team use computer technology to tie
together physically dispersed members in order to
achieve a goal.
 They allow people to collaborate online-using
communication links like wide area network, video
conferencing, or e-mail, whether they are only a room
away or continents apart.
 It allows people to work together who might otherwise
never be able to collaborate.
 Three primary factors that differentiate virtual teams
from face-to-face teams are:1. the absence of para
verbal and nonverbal cues; 2. limited social context;
3. the ability to overcome time and space constraints.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
10
Team Effectiveness
 There is no shortage of efforts at trying to identify
factors related to team effectiveness. The following
discussion is based on what we currently know about
what makes team effective. Keep in mind two
caveats before we proceed.
 Firstly, teams differ in form and structure. Since we
generalize across all varieties of teams we need to
be careful not to rigidly apply the predictions to all
teams.
 Secondly, it is predetermined that teamwork is
preferable over individual work. The key components
making up effective teams can be subsumed into four
general categories as follows:
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
11
Work
Design
Composition
Context
The Team
Effectiveness
Model
Process
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
12
Team Effectiveness (Contd.)
 Context: The four contextual factors that appear to
be most significantly related to team performance
that reflects team contributions are:
 Adequate resources
 Leadership and structure
 Climate of trust
 Performance evaluation and reward system.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
13
Team Effectiveness (Contd.)
 Composition: The category includes
variables that relate to how team should be
stuffed. They are:
 Abilities of members
 Allocating roles
 Diversity

Group demography
 Size of teams
 Member flexibility
 Member preferences
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
14
Ability
Roles and
Diversity
Personality
Composition
Size
Preference
for Teams
Flexibility
Group Demography: The degree to which members of a group
share a common demographic attributes, such as age, sex, race,
educational level, or length of service in an organization and the
impact of this attribute on turnover.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
15
Team Effectiveness (Contd.)
Key Roles on Teams
Adviser
Linker
Creator
Promoter
Assessor
Organizer
Producer
Controller
Maintainer
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
16
Team Effectiveness (Contd.)
 Work Design: Effective teams need to work together
and take collective responsibility to complete
significant tasks. They must be more than a “team in
name only”. The work design category includes:
 Autonomy
 Skill variety
 Task variety
 Task significance.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
17
Team Effectiveness (Contd.)
 Process: The process variables category of team
effectiveness include:
 Common purpose
 Specific goals
 Team efficacy
 Conflict levels
 Social loafing.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
18
Teamwork Processes
Common
Purpose
Specific
Goals
Efficacy
Social
Loafing
Conflict
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
19
Turning Individuals Into Team Players
Selection
Training
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
Rewards
20
Turning Individuals Into Team Players (Contd.)
 Turning Individuals Into Team Players: Many
people are not inherently team players.
 There are also organizations that have historically
nurtured individual accomplishments. They have
created competitive work environments in which only
the strong survive. If these organizations adopt teams
what do they do?
 Moreover, Countries differ in terms of how they rate
on individualism and collectivism.
 If an organization wants to introduce teams into a
work population that is made up largely of individuals
born and raised in an individualistic society they had
to turn individuals into a team players by facing the
challenge and shaping the team players.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
21
Turning Individuals Into Team Players (Contd.)


The challenge: One substantial barrier to using
work teams is individual resistance. To perform well
as a team members, individuals must be able to
sublimate personal goals for the good of the team.
The challenge of creating team players will be
greatest when:
1.
2.


The national culture is highly individualistic.
The teams are being introduced into an established
organization that has historically valued individual
achievement.
The challenge for management is less demanding,
when teams are introduced where employees have
strong collectivist values.
The ability to be a good team player is a basic hiring
qualification thatOrganizational
had toBehavior
bebymet
by all new
A.K.M Musa
22
employees.
Turning Individuals Into Team Players (Contd.)
 Shaping team players: The following summarizes the
primary options managers have for trying to tern individuals into
team players.



Selection: When hiring team members, in addition to the
technical skills required to fill the jobs, care should be taken
to ensure that candidates can fulfill their team roles as well
as technical requirements.
Training: Individuals can be trained to become team
players. Training specialists conduct exercises that allow
employees to experience the satisfaction that team work can
provide.
Reward: The reward system needs to be reworked to
encourage cooperative efforts rather than competitive ones.
Promotions, pay raises and other forms of recognition should
be given to individuals for how effective they are as a
collaborative team member. Do not forget that intrinsic
rewards that employees can receive from team work.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
23
Teams and Quality Management
 The essence of quality management is process
improvement, and employee involvement is the
linchpin of process improvement.
 Quality Management requires management to give
employees the encouragement to share ideas and
act on what they suggest.
 Teams provide that the natural vehicle for employees
to share ideas and to implement improvements.
 Not everyone needs to know how to do all kinds of
fancy control charts for performance tracking, but
everybody does need to know where their process
stands so that they can judge if it is improving.
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
24
Contemporary Issues in Managing Teams
Total Quality
Management
Workforce
Diversity
Mature Teams
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
25
Teams aren’t always the answer
 Teamwork takes more time and often more resources
than individual work. Teams, for instance, have
increased communication demands, conflicts to be
managed and meetings to be run. So the benefits of
using teams have to exceed the costs. And that’s not
always the case.
 How do you know if the work of your group would be
better done in teams? Three tests are suggested.



Can the work be done better by more than one person.
Does the work create a common purpose or set of
goals for the people in the group that is is more than te
aggregate of individual goals?
Are the members of the group interdependent?
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
26
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
27
Organizational Behavior by A.K.M Musa
28