Team
A team is a group of individuals working together to achieve their goal.
As defined by Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management, " team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources, knowledge and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal".
A group does not necessarily constitute a team. Teams normally have members with complementary skills
and generate synergy
through coordinated efforts that allow each member to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. According to Naresh Jain :
Team members need to learn how to help one another, help other team members realize their true potential, and create an environment that allows everyone to go beyond their limitations.
While academic research on teams and teamwork has grown consistently and has shown a sharp increase over the past recent 40 years, the societal diffusion of teams and teamwork actually followed a volatile trend in the 20th century. The concept was introduced into business in the late 20th century, which was followed by a popularization of the concept of constructing teams. Differing opinions exist on the efficacy of this new management fad.
Some see "team" as a four-letter word: overused and under-useful.
Others see it as a panacea that realizes the Human Relations Movement's desire to integrate what that movement perceives as best for workers and as best for managers.
Many people believe in the effectiveness of teams, but also see them as dangerous because of the potential for exploiting workers — in that team effectiveness can rely on peer pressure and peer surveillance.
However, Hackman sees team effectiveness not only in terms of performance: a truly effective team will contribute to the personal well-being and adaptive growth of its members.
English-speakers commonly use the word "team" in today's society to characterise many types of groups. Peter Guy Northouse's book Leadership: theory and practice
discusses teams from a leadership perspective. According to the team approach to leadership, a team is a type of organizational group of people that are members. A team is composed of members who are dependent on each other, work towards interchangeable achievements, and share common attainments. A team works as a whole together to achieve certain things. A team is usually located in the same setting as it is normally connected to a kind of organization, company, or community. Teams can meet in-person or virtually when practicing their values and activities or duties. A team's communication is significantly important to their relationship. Ergo, communication is frequent and persistent, and as well are the meetings. The definition of team as an organizational group is not completely set in stone, as organizations have confronted a myriad of new forms of contemporary collaboration. Teams usually have strong organizational structured platforms and respond quickly and efficiently to challenges as they have skills and the capability to do so. An effective organizational team leads to greater productivity, more effective implementation of resources, better decisions and problem-solving, better-quality products/service, and greater innovation and originality.
Alongside the concept of a team, compare the more structured/skilled concept of a crew, the advantages of formal and informal partnerships, or the well-defined – but time-limited – existence of task forces.
A team becomes more than just a collection of people when a strong sense of mutual commitment creates synergy, thus generating performance greater than the sum of the performance of its individual members.
Thus teams of game players can form to practise their craft/sport. Transport logistics executives can select teams of horses, dogs, or oxen for the purpose of conveying passengers or goods.
Types
Of particular importance is the concept of different types of teams.Categories by subject
Although the concept of a team is relatively simple, social scientists have identified many different types of teams. In general, teams either act as information processors, or take on a more active role in the task and actually perform activities. Common categories and subtypes of teams include:Action teams
An action team is a group of people with leadership skills. It devises strategies, analyze situations and execute needed actions.Advisory teams
Advisory teams make suggestions about a final product. For instance, a quality-control group on an assembly line would be an example of an advisory team: they may examine the products produced and make suggestions about how to improve the quality of the items being made. A product reaches the final stage and is put for sales after getting approved by the advisory teams. The advisory team consists of experts who possess extraordinary skills.Command team
The goal of the command team is to combine instructions and to coordinate action among management. In other words, command teams serve as the "middle man" in tasks. For instance, messengers on a construction site, conveying instructions from the executive team to the builders, would be an example of a command team.Executive team
An executive team is a management team that draws up plans for activities and then directs these activities. An example of an executive team would be a construction team designing blueprints for a new building, and then guiding the construction of the building using these blueprints.Project teams
A team used only for a defined period of time and for a separate, concretely definable purpose, often becomes known as a project team. This category of team includes negotiation-, commission- and design-team subtypes. In general, these types of teams are multi-talented and composed of individuals with expertise in many different areas. Members of these teams might belong to different groups, but receive assignment to activities for the same project, thereby allowing outsiders to view them as a single unit. In this way, setting up a team allegedly facilitates the creation, tracking and assignment of a group of people based on the project in hand. The use of the "team" label in this instance often has no relationship to whether the employees work as a team.Lundin and Soderholm define project teams as a special case in the more general category of temporary organizations which also includes task forces, program committees, and action groups. All of these are formed to "make things happen". This emphasis on action leads to a demarcation between the temporary organization and its environment. The demarcation is driven by four interrelated concepts :
- Time – the time horizons and limits are crucial to the existence of temporary organizations "whose very existence helps spread a sense of urgency".
- Task – the raison d` ètre for the temporary organization; no other party is attending to the same task at the same time in the same way
- Team – provides the human resources to accomplish the task in the time available
- Transition – an accomplishment or some sort of qualitative difference is expected after the time horizon
Sports teams
A sports team is a group of people which play sports together. Members include all players, as well as support members such as a team manager or coach.Virtual teams
Developments in information and communications technology have seen the emergence of the virtual work-team. A virtual team is a group of people who work interdependently and with shared purpose across space, time, and organisational boundaries using technology to communicate and collaborate. Virtual team members can be located across a country or across the world, rarely meet face-to-face, and include members from different cultures.In their 2009 literature-review paper, Ale Ebrahim, N., Ahmed, S. and Taha, Z. added two key issues to definition of a virtual team: "as small temporary groups of geographically, organizationally and/ or time dispersed knowledge workers who coordinate their work predominantly with electronic information and communication technologies in order to accomplish one or more organization tasks". Many virtual teams are solving customer problems or generating new work processes.
Work teams
Work teams are responsible for the actual act of creating tangible products and services. The actual workers on an assembly line would be an example of a production team, whereas waiters and waitresses at a diner would be an example of a service team.Interdependent and independent
One common distinction is drawn between interdependent and independent teams. The difference is determined by the actions that the team members take while working.Interdependent teams
A rugby team provides a clear example of an interdependent team:- no significant task can be accomplished without the help and cooperation of every member;
- within their team members typically specialize in different tasks, and
- the success of every individual is inextricably bound to the success of the whole team. No rugby player, no matter how talented, has ever won a game by playing alone.
Independent teams
- races are run, or points are scored, by individuals or by partners
- every person in a given job performs basically the same actions
- how one player performs has no direct effect on the performance of the next player
In the business environment, sales teams and traditional professionals, work in independent teams. Most teams in a business setting are independent teams.