Defining Teams and Teamwork

1. Introduction

Teamwork can be describe by what is involved when a group of people decide to do something together to achieve a common goal. Working in teams can help speed up the project at hand and can also help the individuals working on the project develop their skills. Creating the team can be a great task also, due to the diversity of backgrounds but making it work can also be greater as team members need to learn to work together to reach the desired target.

2. Benefits of team work to people

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• a. Creativity
• b. Build and maintain their self esteem
• c. Effective skills of interaction and high performance
• d. Personal responsibility

3. Benefits of teamwork to performance

• a. Saves time
• b. For example in health care it improves care and uses resources more effectively
• c. Reduce cost and blur professional boundaries
• d. Example in Louis Vuitton

Teamwork can be describe by what is involved when a group of people decide to do something together to achieve a common goal. Working in teams can help speed up the project at hand and can also help the individuals working on the project develop their skills. Creating the team can be a great task also, due to the diversity of backgrounds but making it work can also be greater as team members need to learn to work together to reach the desired target. When creating a team, we do so in the hope that the members and the organisation will benefit from it. Therefore teamwork has its potential benefits to people and to performance such as, saving time, creativity, building self-esteem, personal responsibility and reducing cost and blurring professional boundaries.

According to Mary Parker Follett, teamwork is an intermediate institution between the individual and the society, and she believed that it was the group that made people organise co-operative action. Likert also believed teamwork was effective because of the principle of supportive relationships.

People value a positive response from others, which helps to build and maintain their self-esteem. Being part of a team also improves the effective skills of interaction and high performance goals of an individual. Different people posses different skills and different ways in which they view every activity, therefore teamwork helps an individual develop his or her creativity as different thoughts and ideas are shared. Teamwork promotes unity, as when people work together they are able to support each other are they have a common goal to accomplish the project. Another benefit of teamwork to an individual is that it can help develop personal responsibility, even though the main focus of the project is the team’s goal but each individual is responsible to do his part in other to accomplish the project.

Teamwork can be beneficiary to performance also by saving time, when a team executes a project, it makes it faster as there are many hands on deck and different brains put together to get a quicker solution. In health care there is an increasing interest in teamwork within those delivering care. It is also believed that encouraging various professions to work as a multi-professional team improves care and uses resource effectively. Working as a team can also reduce cost and remove or reduce professional boundaries. The benefits of teamwork on performance can be seen in the case of the French company Louis Vuitton; eleven of the company’s factories are in France. Employees of all Vuitton factories work in teams of between 20 and 30 people. Each Team such as the one in Ducey plant in Normandy works on one product and members are encouraged to suggest improvements in manufacturing. When the Boulogne Multicolour (a new shoulder bad) a new prototype arrived at Ducey, workers who were asked to make a production run discovered that the decorative metal studs were causing the zipper to bunch up, adding time and effort to assembly. The team informed factory managers, and technicians quickly moved the studs a few millimetres away from the zipper. Which solved the problem.

Another example of performance as a result of teamwork is the case of Coats Ltd a textile company when it decided to introduce self-managed work teams into its management operations to improve quality and efficiency. The members of each team would be able to perform a wide variety of tasks, and have more decision-making power and access to more information. After some initial difficulties they are working well and the performance of the team exceeded expectations especially in three important performance measures. The roles of individual also evolved. They are flexible and also willing to act in different team roles and a survey after six months show that 85percent of staff prefers working in teams.

Finally, Working in teams can be beneficiary to an individual and performance to an organization

Reference:

1. Follet, M.P. (1920), The new state: Group organization, the solution of popular government, Longmans Green: London
2. Likert, R.(1967), The Human Organisation: its management and value, McGraw-Hill: New York

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