TEAMS
INTRODUCTION
Organizations use different types of teams in different ways to accomplish their objectives. A group
whose members have complementary skills, are committed to a common purpose, and hold
themselves mutually accountable.
A team is a group of individuals, all working together for a common purpose. The individuals
comprising a team ideally should have common goals, common objectives.
A group whose individual effort result in a performance that is greater than the sum of the individual
inputs – S. Robbins
CHARACTERISTICS OF TEAM
The major characteristics of a team are as follows:
It is a small group of people with complementary skills.
All teams member must have common goals.
It is self-directing, autonomous, and self-managing.
It has individual and mutual accountability.
It has a unified commitment to goal achievement.
It has two-way communications.
It generates synergy through coordinated efforts
It has leadership roles.
TUCKMAN’S FIVE STAGE GROUP DEVELOPMENT MODEL
TYPES OF TEAMS
1. Problem-solving team
• In the past, teams were typically composed of 5–12 employees from the same department
who met for a fewhours each week to discuss ways of improving quality, efficiency, and the
work environment.
• Members share ideas or offer suggestions on how workprocesses and methods can be
improved.
• One of the most widely practiced applications was qualitycircles.
Quality Circles
• A quality circle is a voluntary group composed of workers, usually under the leadership of their
supervisor (or an elected team leader), who are trained to
• Identify, analyze and solve work-related problems and present their solutions to management in
order to improve the performance of the organization, and motivate and enrich the work of
employees.
2. Self-managed work teams
• Some organizations have created teams to not only make recommendations but also to implement
solutions.
• These groups of employees (typically 10–15 in number) perform highly related or interdependent
jobs and take onmany of the responsibilities of their former supervisors.
• This includes planning and scheduling of work, assigning tasks to members, collective control over
the pace of work, making operating decisions, and taking action on problems.
• Fully self-managed work teams even select their ownmembers and have the members evaluate each
other’s performance. As a result supervisory roles become less important.
3. Cross-functional teams
• These are teams made up of employees from about the same hierarchical level, but from different
work areas, who come together to accomplish a task.
• IBM created a large task force in the 1960s—made up of employees from across departments in
the company—to develop the highly successful System 360.
• The Tata Motors team dedicated to designing the Tata Nano worked in cross-functional teams in
order to manage costs and meet global standards in the designing the car.
• Cross-functional teams are an effective means of allowing people from diverse areas within or
even between organizations to exchange information, develop new ideas, solve problems, and
coordinate complex projects.
4. Virtual teams
• The previous types of teams do their work face to face. Virtual teams use computer technology to
tie together physically dispersed members in order to achieve a common goal.
• They allow people to collaborate online.
• Virtual teams can do all the things that other teams do.
• They can include members from the same organization or link an organization’s members with
employees from other organizations.
• Virtual teams do coordinate work and take decisions fairly and efficiently. Its members can do
their work even if they are far apart and spread in different geographical locations.
5. Multi team systems
Multi team systems (MTSs) are complex organizational forms comprising interdependent teams that
work towards their own proximal goals within and across teams to also accomplish a shared
superordinate goal.
MTSs are highly visible in the public sector in the form of action teams such as emergency response
teams. For instance, a hypothetical MTS could consist of 5 teams: police, firefighters, emergency
medical technicians (EMTs), an emergency room team of surgeons, and a recovery team
GROUP & TEAM
CONFLICT
Conflict - Definitions
Two systems are in conflict when they interact directly in such a way that the actions of one tend to prevent or
compel some outcome against the resistance of the other- Robert Kahn and Katz
A process that begins when one party perceives that another party has negatively affected, or is about to
negatively affect, something that the first party cares about - Stephen Robbins
FORMS OF CONFLICTS
• Traditional view of conflict
- The belief that all conflict is harmful and must be avoided.
• Human Relations view of conflict
- The belief that conflict is a natural occurrence in all groups and organization
• Interactionist view of conflict
- The belief that conflict is not only a positive force in a group but that it is absolutely necessary for a
group to perform effectively.
• Functional Conflict
- Conflict that supports the goals of the group and improves its performance
• Dysfunctional Conflict
- Conflict that hinders group performance
TYPES OF CONFLICTS
• Task Conflict
– Conflicts over content and goals of the work
– Low-to-moderate levels of this type are FUNCTIONAL
• Relationship Conflict
– Conflict based on interpersonal relationships
– Almost always DYSFUNCTIONAL
• Process Conflict
– Conflict over how work gets done
– Low levels of this type are FUNCTIONAL
SOURCES OF CONFLICT
• Incompatible personalities or value systems
• Overlapping or unclear job boundaries
• Competition for limited resources
• •
Inadequate communication
• Interdependent tasks
• Organizational complexity (conflict tends to increase as the number of hierarchical layers and
specialized tasks increase)
• Unreasonable or unclear policies, standards, or rules
• Unreasonable deadline or extreme time pressure
• Collective decision making (the greater the number of people participating in a decision,
the greater the potential for conflict)
• Decision making by consensus
• Unmet expectations (employees who have unrealistic expectations aboutjob assignments, pay, or
promotions are more prone to conflict)
• Unresolved or suppressed conflict
CONFLICT MANAGEMENT/ THOMAS- KILMANN CONFLICT MODES
– The use of resolution and stimulation techniques to achieve the desired level of conflict: