What are work groups?
Groups are mainly interacting to share information and make decision making to help group members improve their performance. The informations is not actionable, and there are no synergies, individual accountability. Skills are random and varied
What are work teams?
Groups whose individual efforts end in a performance greater than the sum of individual efforts, caused by synergies. They have potential to generate mor output with same input. Both mutual and individual accountability and complementary skills.
Name the four types of teams.
- Problem-solving teams
- Self-managed work teams
- Cross-functional teams
- Virtual teams
What are the characteristics of problem-solving teams?
- Group of 5-12 members from same department
- Meet up and discuss weays to improve efficiency and work environment
- Make recommendations
What are the characteristics of self-managed work teams?
- Group of 1o-15 members taking on former supervisor’s responsibilities
- Autonomous in planning, organizing, budgeting and decision-making
- Bad at conflict resolution due to power struggles.
- Conflict beneficial when psychologically safe
- Effectiveness depends on context
Name the characteristics of cross-functional teams
- Employees at same level in hierarchy but different departments form teams to accomplish task
- Beneficial to developing ideas and solve problems
- Developmental stage of team is time-consuming because it takes time to build trust.
What are the characteristics of virtual teams?
- Use of technology to connect remote workers to achieve common goal.
- Less social interaction
- Improves sharing of unique information, decreases overall information sharing.
Name three common ways to make virtual teams more effective
- Establishing trust among team
- Closely monitor team progress
- Publicize products of team throughout organization to make team visible (recognition)
What are multiteam systems?
These are collections of more than two interdependent teams that share a common goal. Communications should happen between leaders to reduce communication demands.
Name the three general categories of factors that make teams successful.
- Contextual influences
- Compositional influences
- Process influences
Name 7 compositional influences
- Ability of members
- Personality of team members (conscientiousness, agreeableess and openness to experience)
- Allocating roles
- Diversity
- Size of teams (small teams most effective)
- Member flexibility
- Member preferences (group vs work alone)
Name four contextual influences?
- Adequate resources (information, equipment etc.)
- LEadership and structure
- Climate of trust
- Performance evaluation and reward system (both individual and team based)
What is organizational demography?
Degree to which group members share a demographic attribute in an organization, and the impact of this attribute on turnover
What is reflexivity?
Team characteristics of reflecting and adjusting plan when necessary
Name 6 process influences
- Common purpose
- Specific goals
- Team efficacy (belief they succeed)
- Conflict levels
- Social loafing
- Mental models
what are mental models?
Organizaed mental representations of the most important components within a tean environment that is shared by team members
Three questions to ask whether teams are the right answer
- Can work be done better by one person in terms of required creativity and complexity
- does the task create a common purpose for the people in the group that is higher than the aggregate of individual goals?
- Are group members interdependent?
How can organizations create team players?
- Selection: hiring team players
- Training: creating team players
- RewardingL providing incentive to be a team player
Selection is the easiest.
