The Concepts of Team Leadership - Essay Example

The business world has become more dependent on the contributions of the collective group of employees working for an organization, than the individualistic jobs been perform by each employee in a firm. Teamwork has become a critical success factor that separates top companies from pretenders in the marketplace. Teamwork is defined as a situation in which group members work together in ways that utilize skills well to accomplish a purpose1. This essay discusses six main ideas extracted from two articles on teamwork. These ideas are analyzed based on a perspective on how the concepts can be utilized in the workplace in the 21st century to enhanced productivity or how the ideas may receive resistance among the people working in an organization. The first article studied is called Team Leadership2. The article discusses various principles, theory, concepts and viewpoints regarding the internal functioning of a team and the importance of leadership inside a team. One concept of importance mentioned in the literature is the need for teams to work applying coordination. The work of the different team members must be coordinated by the leader in order to achieve the work tasks in an orderly and sequential manner. The leader has to coordinate the work and stay on top of the internal affairs of the team in order to ensure the work of each is aligned so that everyone understands the relationship among each other work and a coordinated effort is applied to achieve the desired team and organizational goals. Coordination takes a higher level of importance in team work of complex and complicated tasks. The team members realize the delicate steps involved in for example a sophisticated high cost experiment that requires precise timing and coordination in each step of the project. A second idea mentioned in the article is the concept of functional leadership. Functional leadership is a model whose emphasis is practical applications of leadership to get things done, irregardless of who in the team is doing the leading within the team unit3. The ideas is greatly accepted among employees since it recognizes the contribution being perform by certain employees with leadership abilities which are do not necessarily hold a management position which are typically associated with leadership abilities. Inside a team function of a small team all member can and should demonstrate leadership in order to ensure the success of the project. The project manager is not the only employee responsible of the success of a project, since a project failure is the responsible of the whole unit and will reflect bad on all the members of the team. Among the different tasks that illustrate functional leadership in a team setting are information search and restructuring, problem solving skills, managing human capital and management of resources4. A third idea of importance mentioned in the article is the existence of team processes. The work performed by a team does not occur randomly and there are processes involved in the creation of work. A process that exists in a team is the cognitive process of shared mentality. A team unit begins to behave as a single entity that with the passage of time and additional experience becomes more efficient and better able to handle the works assigned to them. A great example of the shared mentality and improvement of team performance as a consequence of the shared mentality is military team units in warfare. The team becomes a close unit that must think as one entity in order to survive the dangerous environment and difficult tasks the member encounter during work missions. The second article studied and analyzed is called The Effect of Personality Types on Team Performance5. The article discusses the performance of teams within organization and how factors associated with the personality of each individual member affects the overall performance of the team. A concept of importance from this article is joint application design (JAD). Joint application design is a management process which allows IT specialist to work jointly with various employees of different departments within an organization in projects of short time duration6. Joint application design is a practice that was introduced a few decades ago at times when the programmers and information technologist specialist worked as separate individuals within an organization scheme. The concept has taken a while to catch up and become popular, but IT accepted and organization saw the need to integrate IT specialist and other member of different departments in order for the IT people to gain insight into the specific needs on the users of the company’s system. The idea has been well accepted by employees of companies since it provides a way to create better systems design since the feedback from other elements of the organization is heard. The JAD concept may be applied to other types of projects since the important thing is to create teams for projects with employees of different education and work experience background in order to achieve a greater variety of ideas and get people with different personalities to work together to achieve a common goal. A second key idea from the article is existence of four factors that affect team productivity. The four factors are leadership, communication, cohesion and heterogeneity. Leadership helps guide the collective performance of team by a person or group of leaders providing inspiration, solution, encouragement and the right path to complete a team project successfully and on time. Most workers will tell you that a good leader is a valuable asset and the employee works harder for someone they respect and believe in. Communication allows the team member to interact with each other and express their position and ideas about the things the team is working in. Communication keeps the team members involved working towards common goal and objective since each knows exactly what each other expects of them7. Communication is encouraged and accepted by everyone since it opens the flow of information and encourage interchange of ideas. A cohesive team unit means that everyone in the team likes working with each other as united unit, a characteristic which according to a lot of scholars is essential for productive team work. The ideas sounds great, but it practical acceptance is debatable. The ultimate scenario of team play occurs in sporting teams. During the early part of this decade the Los Angeles Lakers were able to win three National Basketball Association championship rings without a truly cohesive team unit since the major stars on the team, Kobe Bryant and Shaq O’Neal disliked each other. Despite the fact there was a lack of cohesiveness the team unit achieved the highest levels of success in this industry. In the business industry acceptance of the cohesive concept may not be accepted since many workers feel their contribution is not affected by the others around them, thus a team may function well and delivered the output as long as they are functional at work and respect each other. Heterogeneity means that a the members of a team unit have backgrounds, genders, skills, abilities, ethnic composition, culture, and overall different perspective on things. Diversity helps teamwork since each players has something different to bring to the table. The corporate world in general has accepted heterogeneity as an ingredient that helps team success since it has become extremely important for workers to adapt to different environments since the inception of the globalization movement. A third concept from the article written by Bradley (1997) is Myers Briggs Type Indicator using Jung’s theory of psychological types. The system provides a way to categorize the personality of a person based on four major categories: extrovert vs. introvert, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling and judging vs. perceiving. The concept can be utilized in the corporate world to create profile of employees. The composition of a team works more effective when employees with different personality profiles are aligned to work together. The MBTI test should be utilized as an internal managerial tool. The employee would not really understand or accept being stereotyped for a project team selection based on his personality type even if the analysis and selection of member is based on a scientific method following the MBTI guidelines. The different ideas describe and analyzed from the two lectures all demonstrate the common theme of showing different aspects associated with team work and its importance in organizations. The most controversial of the six concepts is the utilization of Myers Briggs Type Indicator as a tool for the formation of teams. This concept will be accepted by many managers since there is not hard evidence that a performance improvement will occur, even though in a lot of case studies it has helped overall team performance. Joint application design is good idea that has helped companies gained better value from its IT human resources by getting them to collaborate with other people in the organization on team projects. The importance of teamwork in the organization has become greater in the competitive environment of the 21st century. The new college graduates entering the workforce must realize the teamwork is the key that will help young professional achieve ascension in an organization. Bibliography Jennerich, B. Joint Application Design. Available from http://www.bee.net/bluebird/jaddoc.htm John H. Bradley and Frederick J. Hebert. “The effect of personality type on team performance.” Management Journal of Development, 16.5 (1997). 337-354. John R. Schermerhorn, James G. Hunt and Richard N. Osborn. Organizational Behavior (8th ed.). (2003). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Leadership501.com. Functional Leadership Model. Available from http://www.leadership501.com/node/22/functional-leadership-model Stephen J. Zacarro, Andrea L. Rittman and Michelle Parks. “Team Leadership.” The Leadership Quarterly, 12 (2001). 451-483. Uiuc.edu. Team Communication: What does it take? 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