Team Dynamics

Essay by perkozUniversity, Bachelor'sB+, May 2010

download word file, 5 pages 0.0

Team Dynamics � PAGE \* Arabic �5�

Team Dynamics

Team Dynamics.

Within the last quarter century, the importance of teams has been recognized as a very significant aspect of business world. During this recent time much has been written and talked about the need to understand the processes involved in team building and functioning. Teams should not be created overnight by bringing group of individuals together because teams need time to develop and mature.

Organizations are increasingly focusing on teams to boost competitive advantage by improving productivity, enhancing creativity, increasing response times, and improving decision making. A growing body of literature on teams and work groups supports the assumption that teamwork and team behaviors are necessary for individual and team success. (Jones & George, 1988) Team collaboration, self-development, continuous learning and shared access to information are a few of the benefits to a team orientation. As team approaches increased in popularity, firms have begun to look for employees who possess team skills and have the potential for being good team players.

In the selection process, firms attempt to identify traits and skills that have been associated with team skills (e.g., flexibility, communication). Some believe that participation in team sports contributes to the development of necessary skills to be an effective team member. Others have gone so far as to claim that business teams should be managed like athletic teams (Robinson, 1994).

The forming-storming-norming-performing model takes the team through four stages of team development and maps quite well on to many project management life cycle models, such as initiation, planning, executing, controlling, and closing. Initially the members meet and begin to learn about each other. The team is simply a collection of individuals who are finding out about one another and about the task, even though at this stage the...