Effective Team Characteristics

WORK TEAMS

Teamwork is getting common in business environment and becoming an essential qualities for companies when performing responsibilities, tasks or deal with special projects. Groups and teams play a vital role in most of the organization. Groups defined as two or more people with common interests or objectives (Nelson and Quick, 1999). Robbins and Judge (2009) defined work group is a group dealing together to share information, skills and knowledge to make decisions, and usually no shared responsibility and accountability of outcomes. A team is a group of people with complementary skills and expertise who are committed and mutually accountable for accomplish a common objectives (Clegg et al., 2011).

Group dynamics is concerned with

Understanding task characteristics, team size and team composition is essential for an effective team (McShane and Von Glinow, 2009).

Task characteristics

Teams are more effective in well-structured tasks especially when the tasks are clear and it is easier to coordinate and implement. Task interdependence is which the task share the common inputs, processes or outcomes.

Team size

An effective team need to balance between having sufficient people with the necessary competencies to perform the task, while keeping the team small enough to ease coordination and can make decisions effectively and speedily. When the teams have excess members, cohesiveness and mutual accountability decline, social loafing increases, and members tend to reluctant to contribute and participate. Hence, in desinging an effective teams, manager should try to minimise to nine of fewer

Normally the team performs better on complex tasks as the team members are more creativity and diverse thinking. However, heterogeneous team tends to have more conflict among team members and have great difficulty building interpersonal relationship. They normally takes longer time to agree on norms and goals. For instance, a temporary cross-functional teams comprising of finance, IT and SAP consultant was being formed to discuss and implement the accounting system migration. All department require to meet up regularly for discussion and communicate the issue and concerns over the system migration to consultant.

Teamwork is essential success tools for every organization. There are number of advantages required to cohere together in order to foster an effective teamwork. Team fail to perform to the best of the abilities and unable to achieve highest production efficiency in the absence of teamwork. The benefits of teamwork are as follow:

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