Teams: Organizational Fad or Fantasy - Essay Example

Teams: Organizational Fad or Fantasy? Teams have various advantages to offer to those organizations that believe and give importance to teamwork and are ready to accept this culture in their organization. There is a very huge list of benefits that employers and organizations gain from accepting the culture of team work in their organization. Top of the list of benefits is the fact that teams increases productivity of an organization which is central for the successful operations of the business.

According to Smith, in large organizations where tasks are huge and where different tasks are to be conducted to complete one objective or piece of work, teams with members having varied amount of skills, knowledge and ability outperform as compared to individual performance (Manion 16). For example in health care institutions; a team is required during operating patients, and in these teams there are people who perform different roles such as scrubbing, monitoring and conducting the main task of operating the patient.

In such setting if an individual is assigned the entire task of operating the patient, then time delays and mistakes can cause loss of life. When employees working in a team are provided with responsibility and power to carry out those responsibilities, they feel that the organization believes in them and they feel as if they are business partners with organization, thus these feelings make them work harder and employees perform with greater responsibility as team members as well as individually.

Teams have a better ability to make decisions than individuals and decisions that are critical for the success of the organization should be made by team. For example if an individual is assigned the task of creating a budget for the entire organization, he might fail to incorporate different ideas needed from different departments and create a budget that out of his limited opinions and options. Whereas when teams make such critical decisions, more than one people are involved and different opinions are placed and proper decision are reached which satisfy the entire organization and not just one department of the organization.

Team work solves the problem of limited time that managers have, managers who delegate work to their teams are able to work on other important tasks while the team performs the day to day activities. Team work is even consistent with the changes in social trends. The number of new graduates is increasing day by day and they are making way to the start of their careers, in such situation, new entrants of the workforce need training and coaching and mentoring that can be provided by other experienced team members who are already operating in different organizational settings.

When employees work as teams their responsibility increases, their satisfaction level increases and they feel that they are associated with people which satisfies their need to be associated with others. When employees working in teams, they are not only responsible for their own performance, they are even responsible for the success and failure of the entire team, as when culture of an organization becomes team based, then individual performance is given less priority to team performance. Works CitedManion, Jo, William Lorimer, and William J. Leander. Team-based Health Care Organizations: Blueprint for Success.

Gaithersburg, Md: Aspen Publishers, 1996. Print.