TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

Team Effectiveness



Team Effectiveness

Introduction

Work team effectiveness is defined as “high performance and employee quality of work life. The idea draws from socio-technical theory, which states that both social and technical systems must be maximized for an optimally effective team.”

Effectiveness of team performance is important because teams are responsible for carrying out the duties which ultimately lead to attaining the organisational objectives on a broader horizon. Organisational teams are four types:

Work teams: these are the teams which come to people's mind in the first place when they discuss teams. These teams are uninterrupted work entities held responsible to provide service and manufacture products. Thus, found in manufacturing as well as in service organisations.

Project teams: These teams are formed only for a limited time, in order to execute a project; producing outputs that are one-timed, for instance, implementing a new information system within the organisation or marketing a new product or service. The work, which these teams execute, is either for improvement or an entirely new idea.

Parallel teams: These teams comprise of people from various jobs or units in order to carry out this task which the organisation is unable to perform because of scarce resources. However, due to rising concerns in employee involvement and quality of work, the existence of these teams is fading.

Management teams: The function of management teams is to harmonize the sub units and inter-reliant units through integrating the main processes of the organisation. It is responsible for the performance of a business unit on the whole. Thus, these teams can help the organisation in achieving a competitive advantage.

This paper aims to examine 5 basic reasons which contribute to the effectiveness of teams; however, we will be focusing on project teams in this paper, as their effectiveness is crucial, because of the time limitations.

Discussion

Managerial Control

In case of project teams, autonomy does not contribute to high performance; as in work teams. According to a previous study, the teams having the highest performance rates included those in which the managers exercised control over assigning different tasks to the team members along with the formulation f procedures for tasks. The question, which arises here is, why managerial control is a key predictor of the performance of project teams? Studies identify that team members typically appreciate the abilities of a manager who bring domain knowledge and apply it in various assignments and clarification task procedures. For project tasks, technical as well as social perspective is a necessity; whereas, team members do not have the latter. Nevertheless, a worth-mentioning point is that autonomy may only be important to the project team leader, as his/her name will be associated in cases of success or failure of the project. This can be explained through the following example; a project's team leader will maintain his communication with the managers in a manner that they remain at bay. The project leader does so by spinning negative events as positive in front of the managers so that the management does not discontinue the actives of the ...