Summary

Team Dynamics

In this session, you learnt about the following:

1. Organisational Teams
2. Team Building
3. Team Relationships
4. Power Management in Teams
5. Team Politics
6. Team Conflicts

Organisational Teams

In this segment, you learnt that a team is a group of individuals who comes together with a common
purpose and goals. A group of people just working together need not necessarily form a team.
Individuals in a team must have a common goal that they work towards collectively and generate
positive energy in that process.

You also learnt about the following five common types of organisational teams:

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Each of them has a specific role to play and may form at any one phase of an organisation’s function.

1. Problem-Solving Teams: These are basically bonded by virtue of a common challenge that
they want to solve as a team. It is possible that these teams are formed only when a problem
arises and may get dissolved once the problem is solved.

2. Self-Managed Teams: These are essentially teams that take on the responsibility of managing
the outcomes by themselves. That means there is an absence of a supervisor or a manager
who is directing the goals as each individual feels responsible for the outcomes and for their
own performance.

3. Cross-Functional Teams: A cross-functional team actually has people from the same
hierarchy but across different areas of work or departments.

4. Virtual Teams: These teams are dispersed across regions and collaborate online. Some
companies have teams which are completely remote or virtual in nature.

5. Multi-Team Teams: Like the name suggests, when two or more teams come together to
perform a task, they are collectively termed as a multi-team team or a multi-team system.

Team Building

In this segment, you learnt that there are nine types of roles in teams depending on the skills added
by team members. Based on this, Dr Belbin has classified these nine roles into the following three
groups:

• Action-Oriented Roles: Shaper, implementer and completer/finisher

• People-Oriented Roles: Coordinator, team worker and resource investigator
• Thought-Oriented Roles: Plant, monitor-evaluator and specialist

Through relevant examples, you learnt about these roles:

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 ACTION-ORIENTED ROLES

PEOPLE-ORIENTED ROLES

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 THOUGHT-ORIENTED ROLES

Each role is crucial within the team and, hence, the composition of the team must be done carefully.
However, this does not mean that a team must have nine members. This means, one person can
assume multiple roles based on the requirements of the team.

Team Relationships

In this segment, you learnt about the Johari window and how an individual can manage his and his
team members behaviours through the knowledge of certain personality attributes. The Johari
window can be explained through four areas or panes. These are:

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 Power in Teams

Power is a game of potential and perception. If your team members believe that you control the
resources, you carry the potential to change attitudes and behaviour. At the same time, it is an
asymmetric relationship tilted towards the person who has power, thus leading to a low level of trust
in the relationship.

You learnt that French and Raven proposed different bases of power that exist at a workplace. These
are:

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These different bases of power can be summarised as follows:

1. Reward Power: It is a power exercised by managers while rewarding their team members for
completing a task with excellence. An example could be of a reporting manager or CEO who
decides to sign all bonuses.

2. Coercive Power: It is a type of power that is exercised when an individual can punish
someone for non-compliance. For example, it could be a police officer, security guard, etc.

3. Legitimate Power: A form of power that comes with a belief that an individual has the right to
take a particular decision by virtue of his/her hierarchical position in an organisation.
Examples could be a line manager, CEO, CMO, etc.

4. Expert Power: An individual holds a position of power by virtue of his/her knowledge in a

subject or matter of concern. Examples could be doctors, scientists, etc.

5. Referent Power: It is a type of power that is the result of a person's perceived attractiveness,
worthiness, and right to others’ respect. Examples could be celebrities, influencers on social
media, etc.

6. Informational Power: A form of power where an individual can control decisions basically by
sitting on a lot of information. An example could be of an individual in an organisation who
handles confidential information will have a lot of informational power.
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You also learnt about the soft tactics used at workplace to manage power. These are:

The hard tactics of power management can be summarised as:

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 Team Politics

In this segment, you learnt that political opportunism arises within teams at the workplace when an
individual or a group of individuals take advantage of situations for self-serving purposes.

You also learnt about the following three common conditions that might give rise to politics:

You also learnt about several ways in which a manager can avoid or reduce politics within an
organisation or his team particularly. Some of these are as follows:

• Set clear rules for the allocation of resources

• Promote organisational values and mission
• Reward and train employees who display the right values
• Ensure transparency in the processes
• Keep the employees informed of organisational events and new

Team Conflicts

In this segment, you learnt the five reasons why conflicts arise in an organisation. They are as
follows:

• Conflict due to personality: If the personalities of the two people or groups does not match,
then this conflict arises
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 • Conflict due to goals: If a conflict arises when two people or groups are working on the same
thing but have different goals in mind

• Conflict due to process: It occurs when two or more groups have a conflict due to a difference
in the process, they wish to follow for completing a certain task

• Conflict due to status: It occurs when there is an argument or dispute over who gets the
credit for a task completed

• Conflict due to resources: Conflict due to resources occurs when there is an argument over
shared resources

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