What a team is: Individual person who work as group towards a common goal.
Types of Teams in My Organization:
Department teams:
Department Teams main focus which relates to their specialty, everyone in the department team working towards common goal to organization or mission assigned by the leadership. Different teams comes under in department teams, example Marketing teams, developers, testing etc.,
Fig: 1.1
Problem Solving teams:
Problem solving teams, which they provide solution for specific or common issues in organization. project that involves resolving one or more issues that have already arisen or to deal effectively with issues as they arise.
Problem solving teams can be seen in most of the organizations which they solve most system related and project related problems. Problem solving team has different types of people in it. If problem related to system or server IT person will be taken care. If problem is related to build tools or integration tools platform engineer person will be taken care. If problem related database database administration person will be taken care.
In a business context, a problem-solving team will typically be formed for a limited time frame incorporating staff from different organizational levels with various relevant skill sets.
Fig: 1.2
Cross functional Teams:
Cross Functional Team is a team where people from different functions work towards a common goal. The members of this team could be as subject matter experts from different functions, say, for example, one person from maintenance, one person from design, one person from purchasing, one person from sales. Together they make a cross-functional team. This team is used when you’re working on it improvement project which spans over a number of functions.
In most business settings, permanent team members are going to collaborate with other departments to tackle certain events for the company – such a new product launch. In these situations communication between internal departments is crucial in order to address the project goals.
Fig: 1.3
Self-Managed Teams:
Self-managed teams which works under Leadership control. Self -managed teams are more responsible for delivering the product or service. Employees who are working normally in the organization. Decisions made by the self-managed teams are more powerful because they are made by people who have stronger subject on the job.
People in the self managed team decide their work, what to work and who to do the work. People perform high performance in the workplace and delivering work with higher results. Making proper structure of work and responsibilities and advancement which they deal with. People can work under rush hours with extreme level of tragedies designed work with greater control to customer and make highly un penetrable with technology.
Fig: 1.4
Virtual Teams:
Virtual team which communicates digitally through tools like WebEx and GoToMeeting, they do work for the same organization, but they work from different countries towards common goal.
Fig: 1.5
2. Internal Processes of a team:
Internal process of a team involves the efforts and guidelines executed by the internal team without the involvement of any external partners. In this process the framework is set to have the members of the team operates to achieve project goals and success. Having the internal process will ensure the quality and deliver the proper measures and objects to define accountability towards the success of the project. The main important factor to maintain the effective internal process and keeping the team focused to achieve the common goal.
If the members of the internal process are in a disagreement, it will lead to conflicts with the team members and those type of disagreements will have an affect on the quality of work being delivered. It is important to keep the internal process in order and manage to keep all the team members to be focused and motivated to work towards their tasks to achieve success.
Importance of managing internal processes and external factors of a team:
There will be many external factors that will affect the internal processes and the members of the team which they do not have control towards those factors. The end goal of any superior internal process is properly defined where we are in the current day and the future goals to where the team should will be left unclear sometimes. There could be several improvements that can be done to improve the internal process, to overcome the major barriers of the challenges any internal process team might be facing.
One of the main internal barriers are due to the result of the coming changes and the challenges of the team and the unpredictable factors. To face the changes if is important for the team to act on time with the unified action for the improvement of the team and have day to day accountability of each level and need to remove fear of accomplishment with in the team.
In order to improve the internal process of a team, the main important thing is to evaluate on how much relative effort we put in order to get an expected outcome of the project. One should look at each process effectively by determining whether it needs to work towards the high level of success to manage the level of engagement in the process.
Some main factors that are important to ensure an effective internal process like.
- To ensure the consistent quality.
- Define the accountability and responsibility.
- Enhance the efficiency by eliminating any blockers.
- To provide proper objectives, steps and directions towards the success of the whole team and organization.
- To provide a good framework for profitable growth of the team.
If the process is in a need to be fixed, rather than eliminating a it completely we can make it better by reducing some commons failures, upgrading the processes for each department or team, minimizing the challenges and increasing the response time to have smooth operational levels in the company. This will make the team more effective and efficient in every possible way. The changes needed need not have to be from the top down it can come from bottom up instead of focusing on what each division has to be controlled, and where each team is under and its department control.
It is good to have the external opportunities for any team to grow but the external factors comes with some constraints which need to be managed properly and has to be improved in several different ways that are proven. To improve the internal process and to avoid any external factors that affect the team for a specific product or service is to think about the what the aim is and where the steam stands when looked from outside the organization and what the product or service that the company provides stands in the perspective of a customer. The organization has to follow proper internal process organized and maintained effectively to deliver the product or service to the customer in an effective and timely manner to achieve the goals and success of the team or company.
For example, If we consider a watchmaker who does the repairs of the watches, to fix a problem in the watch he doesn’t necessarily examine the lager parts in the watch he has to examine and ensure every small part of watch is operating as expected and also to detect or avoid any individual clogs from blocking to ensure that each part is working and operating smoothly. Here the internal process is like every individual gear in the watch which has to be treated in the same level for effective process and controls in each level of scrutiny.
3. Effective strategies for enhancing successful team performance:
Better communication:
Communication is one the effective strategy to enhance the success team performance. Clear channels of communication and understanding between your resources is possibly the most important ingredient needed for success which in turn enhances the communication.
Encourage sharing of information and regular, quick status meetings or catch-up chats. Another way to improve your team’s communication is through brainstorm sessions, shared working documents, and a collaborative working environment.
Creating a culture of learning:
Creating a culture of learning helps to enhance the performance of successful team as it creates a scope of sharing the knowledge and understanding the solution from different perspectives. Culture of learning will resolve the challenge of competition as it enables each team member to share and learn so it provides each team member an opportunity to learn and grow to gain the same expertise.
Recognition and incentives:
Recognizing the effort and expertise for an individual is very significant as the respective team member can help make the product more successful. There are several ways to recognize that talent and one of it is to provide incentives and bonuses to team member as part of recognition for his/her accomplishment or achievements which encourage the team member to perform and inspires the rest of the team members to achieve the same which in-turn enhances drastically the team performances.
Operating process:
Operating a streamlined process is one of the good strategy to enhance the effective team performance as it creates a step by step way to reach to a goal through effective defined steps to accomplish it. A operating process also removes the mis understanding of the status quo of task so it provides clear direction and status which could be analyzed to improve and stabilize so as to enhance the effective team performance.
Be a better leader:
Having a good leader in the team increases the team performances to set the standards and the expectations for the team which provides them the direction and inspires to be a leader of that given which in turn increases team performance.
Psychological safety:
Psychological safety is a shared perception among team members indicative of an interpersonal climate that supports risk taking and learning. The research on the psychological safety is significantly stressed on effective error management and learning behaviors on the teams. Support for its importance is provided by a systematic stream of theory and research (e.g., Edmondson, 1996, 1999, 2002, 2003; Edmondson, Bohmer, and Pisano, 2001; Edmondson, Dillon, and Roloff, 2007). This citation proves that creating an environment of this strategy is essential to lay the foundation for effective transdisciplinary collaboration.
Team process competencies:
This section focuses on the individual knowledge and skill which reflects and effects on a good team performance which is also relevant to working well with others. For example Stevens and Campion (1994) developed a typology of individual teamwork competencies with two primary dimensions (interpersonal knowledge and self-management knowledge) that are each assessed with a set of more specific subdimensions.
Get the team involved in managing resources:
Involving appropriate team members in the resource allocation process helps immensely enhancing the team performance by creating a spirit collaboration on critical decisions. As the team members at that low level understands what are the abilities and skills required to fulfill the requirements of the product with the help of leadership. Prioritizing the tasks is significant on order to accomplish the companies vision to deliver on time. This enables the team members to propose the change of priorities and have access to metrics to back up their case.
Support Innovation:
Innovation is necessary for any company to stay in the business. As innovation is part of the team performance . It is vital for a team to constantly innovate on current success without overtaxing the team.Encouraging the team with regular breaks and brainstorming sessions celebrating the milestones and breakthroughs will help increase the team performance by staying current up to date with technology and has acquired required skills and prowess to be motivated to work for the team and in turn for the company.
4. Social Loafing in Teams:
Social loafing is the tendency to reduce individual effort when working interdependently in a collective setting as compared to the individual effort expended when working alone or
independently in the mere presence of others (Williams & Karau, 1993). However, there are
two parts that encompass in to this. The first is that social loafing is due to the fact that one of the individuals in the team is being less interested or motivated in achieving the team’s goal by collaborating with other group members. Factors such as lacking the necessary aptitude may be leading to this kind of behavior. The later part is having a free ride, even though they possess the right type of skills people tend to not contribute anything as they assume that it will be evaluated based on the team/group’s outcome.
Couple of years back, when I was pursuing my MBA program in Notre Dame De Namur University in CA State, I took an Business Ethics course. One of the requirements of this course was a group project on Ethical Traits of Leadership that involved presenting a PowerPoint deck with 25 slides & detailed report to the class. Groups were randomly assigned by the professor and consisted of about five students each. My group had a mix of students with different aspirations. Three of us (myself included) wanted to do everything in our power to get an A on the assignment, and the other two were content to just pass. This complicated matters and was a source of frustration, because those of us who strove for excellence ended up doing a lot more work on the project than those who did not care.
At the beginning, we discussed division of labor and what we wanted to include in our presentation. Those of us who wanted a quality final product were met with resistance almost immediately. We suggested using multiple scholarly articles from reputable sources and including videos clips and graphics in our presentation. The other two suggested that we watch a YouTube about Ethical leadership and just take notes from it and present it to the class. When I explained to them this option would not up to the mark, they did not come to a consensus and agreed on disagreement Each of us left the meeting with a set of tasks that we were to carry out and report back with at the next meeting, where we would put our final project together.
On the Final day, when we have to put together everything and present it before the class it obviously looked that the product, that we worked had the real quality content when compared to the other two. While our parts of the project were well researched and well written, it was precise that the two loafers had not pulled their weight. Their portions of the project were minimally researched and much briefer than those of the other group members. Their submissions also contained multiple spelling and grammatical errors, and their citations were not properly formatted. Since the deadline was looming, we did not have time to make the loafers redo their part of the project, so the three of us who wanted a quality project ended up redoing the sections that the loafers had been assigned in order to bring them up to our standards.
When everything done with, all of us got an A on the final project. Those of us who wanted it and worked hard for it, and those of us who could not have cared less and were content with a C, all got the same grade. The three of us who actually put the work into the project were basically a three person group rather than a five person group, and the two loafers got a higher grade than they deserved while taking it easy over the course of the assignment. The reason that the loafers were tolerated, and the professor was not informed of their slacking is because the other group members did not want to say anything that might create friction in the future.
Furthermore, there really was no mechanism in place to discipline members of the group who were not striving for the same standards as other members. Those who do not really care about the success of the project will really not take any ownership in the project and do not provide any contribution to the success. Intern the rest of the team who strives for success will end up in taking up the responsibility to achieve success and also tolerate these loafers This social loafing concept is present everywhere, right from the school to workplace. The above example clearly explains the importance of team member to be aligned with their goals and the strategies they are working to achieve the goals should be based on strong integrity.
Strategy to Combat Social Loafing :
According to Karau and Williams’ (1991) Collective Effort Model (CEM) states that social loafing can be reduced when expectancy, instrumentality, and valence of the outcome are all considered in a collective setting
Social loafing will be reduced when
1. Group members believe that they will be evaluated by the experimenter, their co-workers, themselves, or others,
2. The size of the group is small,
3. Individuals perceive that their contributions to the collective product are unique, rather than redundant with the inputs of others,
4. Individuals work with mutual respect others (high group valence; friends, teammates, partners, and respected coworkers) or in a situation that activates a salient group identity
5. Individuals have a dispositional tendency to view favorable collective outcomes as valuable
5. Advantages and disadvantages of incentive pay system:
Motivation:
The obvious advantage of incentives is that they give employees a reason to do their best. There are many ways to motivate the team members but one of the significant step to motivate your team member is to recognize the effort and expertise of an individual and reward him/her through an incentive . This provokes the skill internal to the team member and drives them to deliver more efficient and elegant product. Giving the opportunity to earn more is always an encouragement to team members and also inspires the rest of the team members to do the same. Job satisfaction increases which also encourages the team member to stay and produce more.
Increase competition:
Incentive pay system also create a competitive environment where the all the team members are inspired to produce more qualitative work in order to meet the requirements of incentive pay system . This helps the team member to put the effort to do above and beyond to learn skills and implement them in the task which helps both the company and the individual for the best fortunes. It provides the scope to outperform the rest of the team .
Disadvantages:
Built-In Limitations:
It is not an easy task to implement incentive pay system in all the sectors of the company. it’s hard to come up with a metric that works.For example if you are in manufacturing industry it is easy to provide incentive pay system for you can tie the incentives to the amount of product made or to minimizing errors.
Team members who want to earn incentives may do so in ways that hurt the company as a whole. If factory output is the benchmark, workers on the shop floor may prioritize speed and let quality slide. If sales volume is what counts, salespeople may offer customers discounts or deals that eat into your profit margins.
Advantages of rewarding team member Competiance:
Rewarding and recognising the people should deal people separately, Employee rewarding system program to be setup as annually which motivates the people individual or team. This increases the motivation of the people can work with enthusiasm. Designing the reward program must be certain should not hurt any other emotions or feelings.
Recognizing and rewarding people may increase chances to increase the business of organization it may lead people around in the team also like to be more focused on their work and try to achieve the rewards and recognizing like other persons. Person who have achieved, this may lead to motivate everyone the organization.
Disadvantages members in terms of their competencies:
Rewarding and recognising, sometimes may lead to disturbances in a team if we don’t plan certain way, if you not rewarding a correct person in the team it may led to loss of people in team or moving to other teams we may see that.
Interm’s of results:
Interm’s of result of team or individual members in team must be know only by manager or product owner. If all person in team or organization is known other’s results, it may lead to disturbance in the organization.
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