Working in teams and groups Flashcards
What is the difference between groups and teams? What are the types?
Groups are medium-large, usually characterised with one leader and emphasise togetherness.
Teams are usually smaller than groups, with shared/rotating leaders, and emphasise dynamic interactions.
Different types of teams:
- Self-managed: regulate their own behaviours, with limited supervision (like group coursework).
- Cross-functional: people with different specialties are brought together for specific goal(s).
- Quality Circles: employees in an organisation that meet up to improve the quality of work, such as through brainstorming new methods of cheaper production, improving motivation to employees, reducing costs, etc.
What are some expectations of working in a team?
- Achieving complex tasks through working together.
- Sharing or rotating unpopular/boring tasks.
- Understanding and supportive of others.
- Sense of belongingness.
- Helps clarify norms of behaviour across the group.
- Protection from outside pressures of threats.
- Task needs: activities should contribute directly to the performance of the group.
- Maintenance needs: activities that support the social and interpersonal relationships among team members.
What does effective teamwork achieve?
- High levels of task performance.
- High member satisfaction: stronger relationship.
- Lower level of turnover, absenteeism, accidents, errors, and complaints.
Explain the components of the input-process-output (IPO) model.
The input-process-output model consists of:
Inputs: including resources, materials, nature of the task, team size. These are required for the process.
- ideal team members = 5-7 members
- this helps avoid conflict, separation of group into smaller groups.
Process: The way team members interact and work together
- norms.
- cohesion.
- rules.
- communication.
Output: accomplishments, including outputs, so performance, satisfaction.
Overall, this IPO model shows the relationship between inputs to gain the outputs. This can be used to understand the process of teamwork, and how to effectively strengthen different areas to gain better quality output.
What is the issue with working in larger groups?
- The ideal size is 5-7 members.
- Larger groups mean process loss (a loss in performance due to problems with motivation and coordinating larger groups).
- Larger groups mean there is an increased likelihood of conflicts.
Being in teams comes with individuality identity within groups/teams. What does this mean?
Being in a group and knowing how they view us, may influence how we view ourselves within the group, and thus change our self-concept. This influences:
- Team inputs.
- Roles.
- Norms.
- Personality.
Development of roles in teams.
Explain the role types in teams. Cite a study.
Belbin (1993) discusses that team members should be diverse than similar, as they produce more effective and creative results.
- diverse members mean a different strength, and ‘allowable weaknesses’ which can improve with teamwork.
Some roles include:
- Plant: creative, solves difficult problems.
- Shaper: challenging/competitive, thrives on pressure, has drive to complete challenges/overcome obstacles.
- Teamworker: cooperative, mild, perceptive, listens, and averts conflict.
However,
- these aren’t fixed factors, they can be influenced by external factors, such as pressures, mood, etc.
- does everyone fall within these roles?
- limited framework.
- relationship between personality and performance is not made clear.
Issues that come with roles in groups and teams?
Role overload: Occurs when too much is expected an someone feels overwhelmed.
Role underload: Occurs when too little is expected, and the individual feels underused.
Role ambiguity: when the goals of one’s job or method of performing the job are unclear.
Role conflict: incompatible role expectation.
- skills do not match what is demanded.
- too many roles at once.
What is an issue that come with diversity; homogenous and heterogenous teams?
Homogenous teams: teams in which members are very similar to one another.
- this is good as they find it easy to work together, but can be susceptible to groupthink (agreeing to everything, little critical thinking due to agreeing with everyone else to avoid conflict).
Heterogenous: teammates are different from one another.
- Diversity-consensus dilemma: the difficulties to progressing despite being improvements, this can happen through misunderstanding, valuing a perspective more than another, or having a different idea for methodology, which can result in a clash.
How does working in teams also mean less contribution from a member? How would you counter this?
Social loafing: withholding effort on a group task; a motivation problem.
- Free rider effect: lower effort at expense of fellow group members doing more.
- Sucker effect: lower effort due to feeling others are free riding- goal to restore equity.
How to counter this:
- make individual work performance more visible.
- make work interesting.
- increase the feeling of responsibility.
How are team norms formed, using Tuckman’s 5 stage model?
- Forming: member orientation by ‘testing the waters’. Members are still unfamiliar with each other.
- Storming: team members may begin to have conflicts or disagreements as they figure out rules and orientations.
- Norming: conflict resolves with consensus and cohesion.
- Performing: task accomplishment, everyone is functioning and working effectively.
- Adjourning: team has achieved its goals, members are disbanding and celebrating success.
Tuckman’s model provides the process of teamwork and what happens.
- emphasises the importance of conflict in early stages to overcome differences to work together.
- may not apply to all teams: virtual, cross-functional, etc.
