The way people work and achieve their goals is changing as humanity is developing and progressing. Currently, companies are paying less attention to individual work and slowly shifting the work style toward teamwork. The role of teamwork is widely recognized, and an educational curriculum full of teamwork-related courses and training is strong evidence of that. Teamwork is one of the most progressive areas in modern management, and it is not enough to gather good specialists and attract the necessary funds. To do this, one needs to know the main points of team building. As a rule, one person cannot succeed in achieving some common global goal even with a great desire and knowledge. Working groups are organized for such activities, but a group consisting of individuals who have their views and beliefs will also not achieve the desired result. At some point, they do not turn into a team united around one goal, having the same values, and coordinating their efforts in the activation process. This essay will define the team’s effectiveness, consider the model of an effective team, and analyze our team. The effectiveness of a team is its ability to achieve innovation, increase productivity, provide high-quality products and services, and meet the needs of employees. Integration of innovations means that teams are effective if they can respond to the new demands of the external environment. Productivity is the achievement of corporate goals with minimal use of resources (Flores-Szwagrzak & Treibich, 2020). Eliminating defects and matching products and services to consumer expectations can achieve ensuring high quality of goods and services. The team members must be loyal as well as enthusiastic, and their main requests must be met. If all these conditions are met, the team’s work will be practical and will be able to bring a positive result. Those conditions for the success of the team can be created by applying the proper model of effectiveness. In general, we can say that our team showed successful performance on the given task, following major requirements of the team effectiveness model.
First of all, when considering the model of the effectiveness of a team, the type of the team with its structure and form should be taken into account. The factors of the model might vary depending on the type of the team (Choi et al., 2017). Also, the effectiveness model assumes that the work can be done more effectively in a team rather than individually since there is no reason to do teamwork if individual work is effective enough for a particular task (Sen & Ping, 2020). The effectiveness of the team can be evaluated in a variety of ways. For example, the team’s effectiveness can be a measure of productivity, member satisfaction, or the manager’s rating of a team. According to Robbins et al. (2019), there are three main categories in that components of team effectiveness can be organized. These categories can be used to build an effective team in a structured and easy manner. First, the context category consists of four factors, including adequate resources, leadership and structure, a climate of trust, and a performance evaluation and reward system. The second category is related to the composition of the team, which includes the abilities and preferences of team members, their personality and roles, diversity with cultural differences, and the size of the team. The third category covers the processes that team members face when working together. The processes include developing goals and creating strategies, identity, and efficacy, emotional attachment, the mentality of the team, and conflict level. To be more precise, the adequate resources factor stands for the availability of sufficient resources from outside of the group since the team is always a part of the larger organization. According to Robbins et al. (2019), âperhaps one of the most important characteristics of an effective workgroup is the support the group receives from the organizationâ (p. 231). In addition, the performance evaluation and reward system of the team is essential for the reinforcement of the team’s commitment and efforts for success. Factors such as sharing of profit, and group-based evaluation systems can enhance the effectiveness and productivity of the team essentially. In terms of the composition of the team, the abilities of members are directly influencing what the member can do and how effectively perform the task. Personalities of team members define their behavior, which further affects the whole working process. For example, conscientious team members are very responsible and effective in completing the tasks and ensuring the progress of the team (CurĹeu et al., 2019). Also, team members should value the experience of other participants and support diversity. The team needs to be able to manage time so that all tasks are completed on time. In addition, it is essential to resolve conflicts, because one way or another, all team members have their own opinion on a particular situation, and everyone in the team needs to be able to find a common language or quickly resolve conflicts. In our team, all members treated each other with respect, and communication was on a positive level. For the team to cope with the tasks on time, time management was organized correctly; despite changes in the schedule, everything was done on time. Even though it is sometimes challenging to work in a group, thanks to our interpersonal skills and the ability to resolve conflicts, we were a united team, supported each other, and solved issues together. According to the conflict levels factor of team processes category, sometimes conflicts were useful in creating effective discussions, which were driving the progress forward. Moreover, the abilities of the members were an important factor in the success of our team. The combination of all these factors and group work skills has made our team effective. Leadership is one of the key factors in the successful performance of every team, organization, and even the career of any individual. A team, where the responsibilities, thus, the workload are shared randomly, without any agreement between the members, will have difficulties in achieving effective teamwork (Oh et al., 2019). Usually, managers are responsible for being leaders of the team and fulfilling their duties (Giudici & Filimonau, 2019). However, in our team, we did not have a manager; hence, leadership should have been taken by the team members. Fortunately, our team members intuitively were taking a leadership position when it was needed, sharing the leadership duties among all members. Every team member showed different leadership characteristics, contributing to filling the gaps in the team. For example, one member could effectively motivate the other members when the atmosphere of the team was down. At the same time, other members were critical of our performance, which resulted in a better quality of the work. For future work, one of the specific strategies that can be applied to successfully lead the team is increasing the trust among team members. During the teamwork, there will be a lot of situations where every team member has their own opinion and beliefs on how to resolve the problem. In such cases, trust among teammates will allow everyone to listen to the leader and follow his instructions (Yue et al., 2019). Moreover, trust between teammates will allow everyone to focus on their duties without worrying about the responsibility of other members. It will save a lot of time and energy for each member and positively contribute to the whole team. To conclude, the success of teamwork is a more complicated task to achieve than it seems at first sight. Many theories, models, and strategies exist to construct, manage, and lead a team along its journey to achieving its goals. The model of effectiveness is a very useful tool in systematically organizing and enhancing the teams’ efficiency. The model allows to perform a detailed analysis of a team’s performance and evaluate it according to the factors of the model. Such an approach gives an opportunity to easily handle challenges that teamwork can face during the working process. Also, the effectiveness model would be very convenient for the team managers of team leaders to ensure giving smooth and precise direction for a team to act. In case our teamwork, the individual abilities of team members were essential for the successful performance and reaching the goal of the team. Moreover, the ability to effectively resolve the conflicts and use them for the benefit of the team played a critical role when working together.
References
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