The Knowledge, Skill And The Ability Requirements For Teamwork - Essay Example

Team Team is a group whose individual efforts results in a performance that is greater than the sum of the individual inputs. These definitions helpclearly why so many organizations have recently restructured work processes around teams. The extensive use of teams creates the potential for an organization to generate greater outputs with no increase of inputs. Effective teams have certain common characteristics. If management of any organizations hopes to gain increases in organizational performance through the use of teams, it will need to ensure that its teams possess these characteristics. There is no shortage of efforts at trying to identify factors related to team effectiveness. Effective teams need to work together and take collective responsibility to complete significant tasks (Campion, Medsker and Higgs, 1993). So teams are formed around a specific purpose. It provides the team a meaningful purpose which decides the direction, momentum and commitment of the team members. This purpose is a vision and broader than specific goals. In my college, I am one of the team members working to shift and rearrange our library. Setting an objectives and purposes motivates members and increase sense of responsibility and ownership over the work and it make the work more interesting to perform. In my team, the main purpose of the team is to shift the library and arrange the books according to subject index, so that it could be available to each student as soon as possible and it's become easier to search the books immediately. We are the team of 15 self motivated enthusiastic students having zeal to perform the job. This self managed work team is capable of performing highly related or interdependent jobs and ready to take many of the responsibilities. Our team is ready to take the planning and scheduling of work, assigning task to members, collective control over the pace of work making operating decision, taking action on problems. Being the fully self managed team, we have the autonomy to select our team members and evaluate each other performances objectively. Due to these specific characteristics, team leader position within the team decreases and it is almost vanished. We as a team have liberty to express our views and could set our schedules, which has been decided collectively. We have the choice of selecting new members, and disciplines members who creates problems. As a result our response to job assigned to our team has increased and implementation process becomes fast. Once we selected our team members we have different kind of person's having different abilities. In our team we have four members with technical expertise in library sciences. Another four members are from the computer sciences department who are capable of computerizing the library so that book could be found more easily and be issued to students without any problem. Apart from these members of technical expertise our team has 2 members having excellent problems solving skills. These problems solvers and decision makers actually been able to identify problems, generates alternatives, evaluates those alternatives and can make competent choices. The remaining 5 members are from management stream in which one member is form supply and logistic management stream. Apart from being in different streams and backgrounds all the members are good listeners as well as are able to provide objective feedbacks and have the ability of conflict resolution; all the members of my team have good interpersonal skills (Stevens and Campion, 1994). But having members with specific skills also require proper mixture of all the qualities. My team has higher mean levels of conscientiousness. The whole team always tries to maintain higher level of conscientiousness because if a single team members who lacks minimal level of say agreeableness, can negatively affect the whole team's performance so we all members of the team always try to motivate each other and try to create an informal atmosphere within the team. We have a job in our hand i.e., to shift the whole library with minimum time and reorganize and computerize the whole system. Allocating role and responsibilities according to member's skills has the prime importance. As we know that teams have different needs and people should be selected for a team to ensure that there is diversity and all various roles are filled. In each team, there are several roles, team members have to play in executing the tasks assigned to them. In a team we have the members having different roles such as Advisor, linker, creator, promoter, Assessor, organizer, producer, controller and maintainer. We are a successful team having members to fill up all the assigned roles and have people to play in these roles based on their skills and preferences. Each and every member's preferences, qualities and strength have been analyzed and we assigned the work that fit with members preferred styles. By matching individual preferences with team role increased the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the team. There are 15 members in our team and it has been an ideal member for an effective team. Teams with excess members lack cohesiveness, mutual accountability and as a result social loafing increases and more and more people do less talking relative to others (Kirkman and Rosen, 2000). In the process of implementing the job assigned to my team, most of the time we need someone who can perform the job successfully but having a person, who can complete each others job is an added advantage. This type of members provides us upper hand in the competitive situation and reduces our reliant on any single member. In the process of execution of the task, the four contextual factors that appears to be most significantly related to team performance i.e., adequate resources, leadership and structure, climate of trust and performance evaluation and reward systems. In the process of performing the job, our team has been fortunate to have optimum level of resources. One of the major advantages of our team is that it is receiving all the support from the college management as well as from employees' of the college. This includes timely information, adequate support and staffing encouragement and assistance. This support improves our performance. Most of the time we take collective decisions and our team do not have any formal leadership. It is a self managed team with informal relationship which often performs better than the teams with formal leaderships. In our team basically team members compliment and supplement with each others job and absorb many of the duties without any formal allocations. Team members of the team trust each other. Interpersonal trust among our team members facilitates cooperation reduces the need to monitor each others behaviour and bond members around the belief that other on the team won't take advantage of them. In this case team members are more likely to take risks and expose vulnerabilities when they can trust other person of their team. In our organization, teams are generally been evaluated on the group performances. In these types of tasks, group based appraisals, small group incentives and other systems modifications will reinforce team effort and commitment. Our job has been analyzed on the basis of our group performance and analyzing the performance transparently and uniform application of performance criteria on the entire team member creates cohesive environment and members trust each other (McClurg, 2001). We as a successful team, mainly depend on making members individually and jointly accountable for the team purpose goals and approaches. Teams have been formed on the basis of common and meaningful purposes. In our college, major emphasis is on to increase collective belief, stronger performance record, providing training to improve member's skills and interpersonal relationship to improve effectiveness of the team as a whole and team members as an individual. Conflicts within the team are the basic feature of any team. But it is the responsibility of the team members to keep check on conflict level. Controlled conflict basically improves team performances. When we performed our routine activities disagreement among members is the common feature and they are not detrimental. In fact, it is often beneficial because it lessens the likelihood of groupthink. Task conflict stimulates discussion, promotes critical assessment of problems and options and can lead to better team decisions. But apart from all the above discussed features in our team, sometime an individual's success and his aggressiveness and aspirations come up with conflicting situation to group thinking and norms. Secondly when we are working in an environment completely open and multicultural, we find that national cultures are highly individualistic and group/team approach is not acceptable to the members these national culture. So we need a cross cultural training to avoid these entire shortcomings to perform much better. In our college, till recently we are nurturing individual accomplishments. This has created an environment where only strong and intelligent survived. Now to adopt team culture which solely depends upon collective growth often comes in conflicting situation. As we know that some countries prefer individualistic culture where as some on high collectivism, teams only best fit to collectivistic culture. The basic challenge we are facing as a team is to assimilate personal goals for the good of the team. Nowadays teams are the most relevant and common structure in almost all types of organizations whether colleges or any business organization. The major challenge for the organizations which pursue teams is how to evaluate team's performance objectively as against the individual performance. Basically most of the organizations bred a competitive climate that encouraged individual achievements and recognition and in present circumstances organizations are finding it difficult to cope up with this contradictory approach. Now it has been an established fact that at the organizational levels only the teams provides members to share their ideas. All the idea sharing activities require high level of communications and contact, response and adaptations and coordination. Teams provide the natural vehicle for employees to share ideas and to implement improvements (Robbins, 2003). Teams generally provide us multiple perspectives, greater openness to new ideas, multiple interpretations, increase creativity and flexibility and improve problem solving skills. At workplace we have to improve teams all the time because of its inherent values which always relates to human tendency of cooperation not conflict or cooperation. ***************************************************************** References: 1. M. A. Campion, G.J. Medsker and C.A. Higgs, (1993), "Relations between work group characteristics and effectiveness: Implications for designing effective work groups," Personnel psychology, winter, pp. 823-50. 2. B.L. Kirkman and B. Rosen, (2000), "Powering up teams," Organizational Dynamics, winter, pp. 48-66. 3. M.J. Stevens and M. A. Campion, (1994), "The knowledge, skill and the ability requirements for teamwork: Implications for Human Resource Management," Journal of Management, summer, pp. 503-30. 4. L. N. McClurg, (2001). "Team rewards: How far have we come" Human Resource Management, spring, pp. 73-86. 5. Robbins, S.P. (2003), Organizational Behaviour, 10TH Edition, Pearson Education Inc. Read More