Organizational Behavior

Assignment
In place of class quiz

“Team Building”

By,
Ziauddin
Reg.No 1552-110022
Subject O.B
Quarter: Spring-2010
PRESTON UNIVERSITY KARACHI

Teams in the Modern Workplace

No matter what profession we choose, more than likely, we will be asked
to contribute to a team. Teams are found in many modern workplace

Assignment
“Team
Building” 1
 environments in fields ranging from engineering and health care to
journalism and foreign policy.

More than ever employers are looking for ways to combine individual
talents and harness the synergy of a high performance team. Some of
the specific benefits include:

1. Complete large-scale projects - Many projects in the

workplace are too large or too complex for one individual to complete
alone. Imagine trying to build the Golden Gate Bridge all by yourself!
2. Develop More Solutions - Different people looking at the same
problem will find different solutions. A team can review ideas and put
together a final solution which incorporates the best individual ideas.
3. Detect Flaws - A team looking at different proposed solutions
may also find pitfalls that an individual might miss. The final solution is
that much stronger.
4. Build Social Connections - Working on a team allows you to
interact with your colleagues much more than sitting in neighboring
cubicles - or lecture seats - would.

Nature of the Teams

It is now rare to find a team, who all know each other, sit in the same work
area day by day, work the same hours, work within the one organization,
have a common business culture and enjoy prior history of working together.
Today's' teams are a complex alliance of staff members from different
organizations, departments, professions, locations, using different
technology platforms, with different technology backgrounds and engaging
with varying levels of involvement from core member to part-time member
to occasional reviewer. These are very different beasts to the kind of teams
many of us grew up with. I believe that the difference is so significant that
we need a new name for such teams - the Virtually Networked Team.

Virtual Teams
"Virtually" means that the team will be dependent on Internet technologies
much more than before. Less obvious but equally significant is the fact that
"virtually" also means that the team operates with "virtual capacity" where
virtual is used in its original sense of "not physically present". This means the
team constantly grows and shrinks its active membership throughout its

Assignment
“Team
Building” 2
lifetime which makes it much harder to maintain a coherent sense of team
and purpose.

"Networked" means that the team is made of individuals who are not
always part of the same organization and even when they are, rarely share
common reporting lines rendering a "command and control" approach
ineffective

I define a Virtually Networked Team as a team pulled together by one or

more co-operating organizations to achieve some important, urgent and
specific objective such as the:

• planning and launching of a major event

• designing and running of a new program or initiative
• developing and market testing of a new product
• running of a major campaign to open up a new market sector
• design and implementation of improved business processes
• planning and execution of a change management and training
initiative

In today's organizations, supply chains, alliances and networks Virtually

Networked Teams are now the dominant means for getting big things done!

Self-Managed Teams
The most well known trait of a bio-team (e.g. ants, honey bees etc) is Self-
Management or Autonomy. Basically each team member manages itself and
does not need to be told what to do. This is different from most
organizational teams which use "command and control” wait till told and
obey orders. So bio-teams operate as "self-managed teams". This does not
mean that there is no leader but that every member is a leader in some
domain.

Application of this trait allows a team to successfully address the

fundamental problem of accountability in a Networked Team Structure.

Non-verbal broadcast communication

Bio-teams have superb communications, which do not rely on direct

member-to-member communications.

This is hugely relevant today in our teams with multiple locations and every
one working different hours where members can't physically meet that often.

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“Team
Building” 3
It also shows us that whilst face-to-face communication has an important
place a team can often achieve its goals without it.

Application of this trait helps us to design the team's communications in a

way which eliminates communication bottlenecks and redundancies.

Action-focused

Another trait is that bio-teams solve problems and learn by rapid

experimentation and evolution. Bio-teams have very concrete goals which
are hard-wired into the members genetically but the members don't have
any actual strategies or plans for achieving them. They work by rapid
experimentation and feedback. If something works and solves the problem it
gets reinforced within their collective set of responses for the next time - if
not it dies. Bio-teams are action-focused - they act first and ask questions
later!

Application of this trait enables us to design simple team member rules of

behavior and feedback mechanisms to enable a team to rapidly evolve
improved effectiveness

Make Team Effective

Team Building

Building a good team is the single most important thing a Team Leader can do to achieve a
successful project. With the right attitude, a team will overcome almost any difficulty to succeed
in its goals. In most projects there will be times when only the determination of the team can
overcome the difficulties and carry the initiative through to success. Even when there is no
pressure, the team's spirit and enthusiasm will be reflected in the quality of the solution and the
extent to which other people buy-in to it.

There is a whole area of academic study and practical experience about building good teams.
Business psychologists present many theories concerning the way in which people interact. A
world-class Team Leader needs to be an amateur psychologist and a manipulator of human
behavior. Here are some of the factors which generally lead to a good team:

 shared belief in the value and achievability of the team's goals,

 awareness of the value of the individual's own role and contribution,
 recognition of the value of other team members (whether they are key specialists or just
non-specialist, junior assistants),
 desire to work collaboratively, sharing thoughts, ideas, concerns, etc,
 friendship - enjoying working together with a common purpose,

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“Team
Building” 4
  supporting each other in recognition that the team's success requires all members to be
successful,
 coaching junior members rather than bossing them,
 listening to ideas and advice from other team members,
 making time to communicate with other team members,
 celebrating successes,
 Rewarding good team behavior in financial and non-financial ways.

To achieve this collaborative team style, the Team Leader usually needs to behave as one of the
team - collaborative, supportive, friendly, etc. The Team Leader should be the best of friends
with each team member to the extent that each participant would go to great lengths to help the
objective succeed.

It is interesting to compare this project management style with the traditional view of the Team
Leader. Often the best recognized Project Managers are those who make a lot of noise, bang the
table, make snap judgments, are tough with their people, "crack the whip" and generally drive
people to perform through the exercise of power. These behaviors are very visible and it is
common to find managers with this personal style do get recognized and promoted.

A regime of terror can only succeed so far and for so long. There comes a point where the
participants give up trying and no amount of pressure can persuade them to increase their
contribution. Beyond that point, people will leave and the project will fail. Conversely, in a
collaborative team the participants feel that the team's success is their own personal mission.
They will respond ever more determinedly as the pressure rises.

Group Leadership

The Team Leader who has created an excellent team will find the team performing optimally
with very little intervention. Herein lies the dilemma for a career-minded Team Leader. In good
projects the Team Leader does not need to (and should not) exhibit dramatic, powerful, personal
characteristics, but the organization’s leadership may be more likely to recognize the talents of a
manager who creates a lot of noise.

The reality is that a sensible balance achieves the best results:

reward vs punishment
pleasure vs pain
opportunity vs threat
encouragement vs coercion

The classic analogy is the donkey, motivated by the promise of a carrot

and the threat of a beating with the stick. Most psychologists believe that the positive experience
of the carrot is much more successful than the negative threat of the stick. They would argue that

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Building” 5
the stick should be applied only on rare occasions with good cause - or, maybe, never at all. The
carrot should be offered as a constant reward for performance.

A similar balance should be achieved between the stimuli generated by the availability of
opportunities versus the instinctive survival reaction to threats.

Building a collaborative team

But who said teams need to be hierarchical? Within a team you will find a mixture of different
people with different assignments - but that does not necessarily require a hierarchy. The best
team cultures develop where team members recognize that everyone else also has important
value to contribute.

For each issue someone needs to be the recognized leader; someone has to believe it is their
responsibility to drive an issue otherwise it may become forgotten. For each issue there will be a
sub-set of people most appropriate to make contributions. "Appropriate", here, means a
combination of capability, resource scheduling/availability, and the need to build a good team.

The team structure that develops (either formally or informally) will be flexible such that the
right people work together for any given topic. It also means that a leader for one issue might be
only a contributor for another - and vice versa. A can be B's "boss" in some aspects of the
teamwork, but B might be A's boss in others.

It is a good idea to give everyone responsibility for some aspect, major or minor, of the overall
success of the objective.

Assignment
“Team
Building” 6