Communication Skills, Employee Motivation and Morale Development

Distribution Reform, Upgrades and Management (DRUM) Training Program

Building Relationship and Team Work

A. David Mohan
Principal & Manager/UIIC

What is Team?
A Team is a group of people working together to achieve common objectives and willing
to forego individual autonomy to the extent necessary to achieve those objectives.

A smallest team consists of 2 people and the upper limit can be to the size of the
organization. The whole organization can work as a team if its members develop a
common style of working i.e., constructive and cooperative and whenever they need to
interact with each other. This is normally described as teamwork. An organization is
viewed as a net work of teams, temporary and permanent.

Working together to achieve common objectives was the second component of the
above definition. The common objectives imply that each member of team shares its
objectives and identified whole heartedly with them. In other words by joining a team,
the individual member ‘sings on’ to the team’s objectives; he enters into a contract as a
condition of becoming a member of the team.

Next component of the Team is commitment. The degree of commitment, with which an
individual of the group involves, however, can vary enormously according to the
circumstances. At the lowest level, he may have been compelled to join this particular
team by the organization as a price of continuing his career in it or he may have
involved with the team with enthusiasm when he joined, but has now become
disillusioned or no longer accepts the way the objectives have changed over time. The
individual team member is in a team in order to satisfy his own personal needs which
need not be identical with those of the team. The balance between the individual’s
contribution and the satisfaction of the needs, the more harmonious the team is like to
be.

The final component of the above definition was willing to forego personal autonomy to
the extent necessary to achieve the common objectives i.e., by joining a team one has
to limit his freedom to do as he likes.

There cannot be a team without leader who has ultimate responsibility for deciding the
degree to which autonomy of the team member has to be constrained. He has to
exercise his responsibility in a way that it does not erode the commitment of the team
members. He needs to establish the constraints through a consultation process of
problem solving and negotiations.

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 Communication Skills, Employee Motivation and Morale Development
Distribution Reform, Upgrades and Management (DRUM) Training Program

Team and Individual

In a team, individual members tend to be highly aware of their responsibility, whether it
stems from social pressure or the fulfillment of personal need. Teams are capable of
performing functions and achieving some goals more efficiently and accurately than
individuals can. Although there is evidence that individuals sometimes perform better
than teams, the quality of decision making is much high in teams working under certain
conditions.

Each human is to some extent unique. Each of us is composed of attitudes, beliefs and
values that define who we are. Some people may believe that engaging in team
decision making will have little impact on oneself. Others might conclude that individual
self concept is over powered by the Team.

The team and the individual members are dependent on each other. Relationships play
vital role in the process. The selves of the individual members and mature and grow
with the team just as the entire team process nurtures and grows with each individual
self.

Team Vs Group
Groups and teams are not the same thing. Group is two or more individuals interacting
and interdependent who have come together to achieve particular objectives. A work
group is a group that interacts primarily to share information and to make decisions to
help each member perform within his/her area of responsibility.

Work groups have 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 that would create an overall level of
performance greater than the sum of inputs. A work team generates positive synergy
through coordinate effort. Their individual efforts result in a level of performance that is
greater than the sum of those individual inputs. Management is looking for that positive
synergy that will allow their organization to increase performance. Merely calling a
group a team does not automatically increase its performance.

To perform effectively a team requires three different types of skills:

 It needs people with technical expertise.

 It needs people with the problem solving and decision making skills to be able to
identify problems, generate alternatives, evaluate those alternatives and make
competent choices.
 Teams need people with good listening, feed back, conflict resolution and other
inter personal skills.

No team can achieve its performance – potential without developing all three types of
skills. The mix is crucial. Too much of one at the expense of others will result in lower

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 Communication Skills, Employee Motivation and Morale Development
Distribution Reform, Upgrades and Management (DRUM) Training Program

team performance. But team doesn’t need to have all the complementary skills in place
at the beginning.

It is not uncommon for one or more members to take responsibility to learn the skills in
which the group is deficient, thereby allowing the team to reach its full potential.

Team Building Process

Organizations are increasingly relying on teams to accomplish work tasks. Team
building efforts can be applied within groups or at the inter group level and leave inter
group development to the next section. As result, our interest concerns applications to
organizational families (command groups) as well as to committees, project teams, self-
managed teams and task groups.

Not all group activity has interdependence of functions. To illustrate, consider a football
team and a track team. Although members on both teams are concerned with the
team’s total output they function differently. The football team’s output depends
synergistically on how well each player does his particular job in concert with his
teammates. The quarterback’s performance depends on the performance of his
linemen and receivers, and ends on how well the quarterback throws the ball and so on.
On the other hand, a track team’s performance is determined largely by the mere
addition of the performances of the individual members.

Team building is applicable to the case of interdependence such as in football. The

objective is to improve co-ordinate efforts of members that will result in increasing the
team’s performance.

Intra Group Development

The activities considered in team building typically include goal setting, development of
interpersonal relations among team members role analysis to clarify each member’s
role and responsibilities and team process analysis. Of course team building may
emphasize or exclude certain activities depending on the purpose of the development
effort and the specific problems with which the team is confronted. Basically, however
team building attempts to use high interaction among members to increase trust and
openness.

It may be beneficial to begin by having members attempt to define the goals and
priorities of the team. This will bring to the surface different perceptions of what the
team’s purpose may be. Following this, members can evaluate the team’s performance
– how effective are they in structuring priorities and achieving their goals? This should
identify potential problem areas. This self critique discussion of means and ends can be
done with members of the total present or, where large size impinges on a free
interchange of views, may initially take place in smaller groups followed up by the
sharing of their findings with the total team.

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 Communication Skills, Employee Motivation and Morale Development
Distribution Reform, Upgrades and Management (DRUM) Training Program

Team building can also address itself to clarifying each member’s role on the team.
Each role can be identified and clarified. Previous ambiguities can be brought to the
surface. For some individuals, it may offer one of the few opportunities they have had
to think through thoroughly what their job is all about and what specific tasks they are
expected to carry out if the team is to optimize its effectiveness.

Inter-group Development
A major area of concern in OD is the dysfunctional conflict that exists between groups.
As a result, this has been a subject to which change efforts have been directed.

Inter-group development seeks to change the attitudes, stereotypes, and perceptions

that groups have of each other. For example, in one company, the engineers saw the
accounting department as composed of shy and conservative types, and the human
resources department as having as bunched of “ultraliberals who are more concerned
that some protected group of employees might get their feelings hurt than with the
company making a profit.” Such stereotypes can have an obvious negative impact on
the coordinative efforts between the departments.

Although there are several approaches for improving inter-group relations, a popular
method emphasizes problem solving. In this method, each group meets independently
to develop lists of its perception of itself, the other group, and how it believes the other
group perceives it. The groups then share their list, after which similarities and
differences are discussed. Differences are clearly articulated, and the groups look for
the causes of the disparities.

Are the groups’ goals at odds? Were perceptions distorted? On what basis were
stereotypes formulated? Have some differences been caused by misunderstandings of
intention? Have words and concepts been defined differently by each group? Answers
to questions like these clarify the exact nature of the conflict. Once the causes of the
difficulty have been identified, the groups can move to the integration phase – working
to develop solutions that will improve relations between the groups, sub-groups, with
members from each of the conflicting groups, can now be created for further diagnosis
and to begin to formulate possible alternative actions that will improve relations.

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