Name: JUDELIE D.

DALIT
Course: MPA
Subject: HUMAN BEHAVIOR ORGANIZATION
Professor: DR. NOEL H. NATIVIDAD

UNDERSTANDING WORK TEAMS

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Popularity of Teams
2. Teams vs Groups
3. Types of Teams
4. Creating Effective Teams
5. Turning Individuals into Team Players
6. Beware! Teams aren’t Always the Answer

1. POPULARITY OF TEAMS
- Great way to use employee talents
- Teams are more flexible and responsive to changes in the environment
- Can quickly assemble, deploy, refocus, and disband
- Facilitate employee involvement
- Increase employee participation in decision making
- Democratize an organization and increase motivation

2. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GROUPS AND TEAMS

Groups
- Come from having a large number of people or a
cohesive willingness to carry out a focused action.

- Is a number of individual forming a unit for a reason

or cause

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 Teams
- Focus depends on the commonality of their purpose
and how individuals are connected to one other.

- Is a collection of accomplished people coming

together for a common goal that needs completion.

To describe more the differences we also look at a work group and work team.
Work Group
- Two or more individuals who are interdependent in their accomplishments and may or
may not work in the same department.
Work Team
- Has a member who works interdependently on a specific, common goal to produce an
end result.
Main Thread
Team, works together and shares in the outcome while a Group, is more independent of each
other.

All teams are groups but not all groups are teams

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3. COMPARING WORK GROUPS & WORK TEAMS

In Goals..
The basic purposes of work group is to attain it is to interact primary to share information
while the work team is collective performance.
In Sinergy..
A work group performance is merely summation of each group member’s individual
contribution. There is no positive synergy. While A work team generates positive synergy
through coordinated effort. So, The level of teams performance is greater than the sum of
individual inputs.
In Accountabiility..
In the work group, the members are individually accountable while In a team, there is
both individual and mutual accountability.
And in Skills..
In work group, members skill is random and varied while work teams is complementary
to their work.
Every work group must have strong and clearly focused leaders. The teams do not have a
clearly focused leader, they it has shared leadership roles. The work group has formal and
efficient meetings. The team generally encourages open ended active problem solving
meetings. The effectiveness of the work group is measured indirectly for example, if the overall
financial performance of the business is good, it will be presumed that the groups have also
effectively contributed to the performance. The effectiveness of the teams is directly measured
by the teams by assessing the collective work products. The functioning of the work group is

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that it discusses, decides and delegates. The functioning of the team is that it discusses,
decides and does real work.

TYPES OF TEAMS
1. 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.…thereby increasing employee motivation.

2. Self-Managed Work Teams

Groups of 10 to 15 people who take on the responsibilities of their
former supervisors.

3. Cross-Functional Teams
Employees from about the same hierarchical level, but from different work areas, who
come together to accomplish a task.
- Very Common
- Task forces
- Committees

4. Virtual Teams
Teams that use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members in
order to achieve a common goal.
Teams that use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members in order to
achieve a common goal
 Characteristics
- Limited socializing
- The ability to overcome time and space constraints
 To be effective, needs:
- Trust among members
- Close monitoring
- To be publicized
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4. CREATING EFFECTIVE TEAMS
Key Components of Effective Teams
I. CONTEXT
 Adequate Resources
- Need the tools to complete the job

 Effective Leadership and Structure

- Agreeing to the specifics of work and how the team fits together to integrate
individual skills
- Even “self-managed” teams need leaders
- Leadership especially important in multi-team systems

 Climate of Trust
- Members must trust each other and the leader

 Performance and Rewards Systems that Reflect Team

- Contributions cannot just be based on individual effort

II. COMPOSITION
 Abilities of Members
- Need technical expertise, problem-solving, decision-making, and good
interpersonal skills

 Personality of Members
- Conscientiousness, openness to experience, and agreeableness all relate to team
performance

 Allocating Roles and Diversity

- Many necessary roles must be filled
- Diversity can often lead to lower performance

 Size of Team
- The smaller the better: 5 to 9 is optimal

 Member’s Preference for Teamwork

- Do the members want to be on teams?

III. WORK DESIGN

 Freedom and Autonomy
- Ability to work independently

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  Skill Variety
- Ability to use different skills and talents

 Task Identity
- Ability to complete a whole and identifiable task or product

 Task Significance
- Working on a task or project that has a substantial impact on other

IV. PROCESS
 Commitment to a Common Purpose
- Create a common purpose that provides direction
- Have reflexivity: willing to adjust plan if necessary

 Establishment of Specific Team Goals

- Must be specific, measurable, realistic, and challenging

 Team Efficacy
- Team believes in its ability to succeed

 Mental Models
- Have an accurate and common mental map of how the work gets done

 A Managed Level of Conflict

- Task conflicts are helpful; interpersonal conflicts are not

 Minimized Social Loafing

- Team holds itself accountable both individually and as a team

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A Team Effectiveness Model

5. TURNING INDIVIDUALS INTO TEAM PLAYERS

 Selection
- Make team skills one of the interpersonal skills in the hiring process.

 Training
- Individualistic people can learn

 Rewards
- Rework the reward system to encourage cooperative efforts rather than
competitive (individual) ones
- Continue to recognize individual contributions while still emphasizing the
importance of teamwork.

help us predict turnover, turnover will be greater among those with

dissimilar backgrounds bc it decreases communication and increases
conflict (diversity hurts orgs!!?), BUT cultural diversity can be an asset to

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tasks that require a variety of viewpoints but they also struggle to work
together, takes time for differences to settle/not be a problem
■ size of teams - most agree that keeping teams small is a key to improving
group effectiveness, 5 to 9, too many members declines cohesiveness,
mutual accountability, and communication
■ member flexibility/member preferences - not every employee is a team
player, many employees will select themselves out of team participation,
high performing teams are likely to be composed of people who prefer
working as part of a group
○ PROCESS
■ common purpose - effective teams begin by analyzing the team’s mission,
developing goals to achieve the mission, and creating strategies for
achieving the goals, common purpose becomes a GPS to provide
direction/guidance, effective teams show reflexivity by reflecting
on/adjusting their master plan when necessary
■ specific goals - successful teams translate their common purpose into
specific, measurable, and realistic performance goals, specific goals
facilitate clear communication and help teams focus on getting results
■ team efficacy - effective teams have confidence in themselves, believe
they can succeed
■ Mental models - effective teams share organized mental representations
of the key elements within a team’s environment that team members
share, shared ideas of how to do things
■ conflict levels - conflict has a complex relationship with team
performance, relationship conflicts are almost always dysfunctional vs.
task conflicts stimulate discussion/promote critical assessment of
problems and options and can lead to better team decisions
■ social loafing - individuals can engage in social loafing and coast on the
group’s effort, effective teams undermine this by making member
individually and jointly accountable for the team’s purpose, goals, and
approach
● Potential group effectiveness + process gains - process losses = actual group
effectiveness
Turning individuals into team players
● Selecting: hiring team players
○ Be sure candidates can fulfill their team roles as well as technical requirements
○ Personal traits appear to make some people better candidates for working in
diverse teams
● Training: creating team players
● Rewarding: providing incentives to be a good team pl

6. BEWARE! TEAMS AREN’T ALWAYS THE ANSWER

Teams take more time and resources than does individual work.

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  Three tests to see if a team fits the situation:

1. Can the work be done better using more than 1 person?

2. Is there a common goal for ALL members which is greater than the sum of each
individual’s goal?
3. Are the members interdependent?

Additional Information
Benefit Result
Point: Teams are great!
Increase employee motivation.
 Higher levels of productivity.
 Increased employee satisfaction.
 Common commitment to goals.
 Improved communication.
 Expanded job skills.
 Organizational flexibility.

Assumptions
Counter Point: Teams are not so great!
 Mature teams are task oriented and have successfully minimized the negative
influences of other group forces. (What about apathy? Infighting?)
 Individual, group, and organizational goals can all be integrated into common team
goals.  (What about competition? Stress? Frustration? Individualistic personality
traits?)
 Participative or shared leadership is always effective. (Some people need
leadership!)
 The team environment drives out the subversive forces of politics, power, and
conflict that divert groups from efficiently doing their work. (What about special
deals? Favoritism? Enemies? Teams can't stop this!)

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