Chapter 10 Work Teams

[Music] okay we're back and we're talking about work teams now much of what was said in Chapter nine applies to this chapter as well so what we said about groups tends to apply to teams teams are just a little bit more focused than groups they tend to be a little bit more aggressively focused on what has to happen to accomplish the objectives so organizations tend to use teams because they offer a better way to align employees talents to get people into a group where they can work together in order to achieve these goals they tend to be more flexible they tend to be responsive to changes they tend to facilitate participation in operating decisions that is if a team works on something together they tend to agree more with each other about how to get things done and they tend to agree and then go move forward and get things done there are a number of different types of teams the book talks about problem-solving teams where they're all independently looking at the issue or self-managed teams where there's no real leader involved but they're all kind of trying to work together and negotiating what needs to be done in order to get it done and there's a lot of literature that shows that self management teams tend to work very effectively there's cross-functional teams that is people from the accounting and the finance and the marketing and the different departments research and design whatever are all working together on a particular task throughout the organization and then there are virtual teams if you're doing this online you're part of a virtual team now virtual teams have benefits you can be in different places and work on the same thing and they have drawbacks it's harder to work with a virtual team than it is to walk down the hall and ask somebody a question the context of the team is important so what factor determines whether teams are going to be successful or not at the top of that list it has to be leadership and structure the leadership that either allows the team or operates and functions with the team now you don't have to have a team leader but you have to have leadership that will at least allow a self-managed team structure if you don't have that so leadership and structure is important the structure has to be appropriate to the task that you're trying to complete performance evaluations and rewards what are the incentives involved in team behavior now this is important because sometimes we want team but we actually incentivize individual behavior and then you're at cross-purposes and it doesn't work it falls apart because you're not an alignment adequate resources this is huge in my estimation this is one of the biggest things that I have seen of why teams haven't been able to get things done because we asked them to do something that takes this much effort and supply and resources and then we equip them with that much and when you do that they can't get what you're they're trying to get done they become demoralized they become frustrated and then it becomes there becomes a group norm where they're griping about management and when that happens you get this declining spiral finally a climate of trust that relates to the last one but they have to be able to trust management and they have to be able to trust each other in order to function well team composition is an important thing how many members of the team what are the abilities of the team members it can they get to get along and work together so their personality is important who's going to be doing what what roles are they going to play the diversity of the team we talked about diversity in chapter 2 now the diversity is an important concept because God is a God of diversity right so he is I mean if he has made as many flowers as he has certainly he has given us different perspectives and ways of operating and in a team environment all of that comes out in in full bloom where we're seeing each other's taste and understanding of things and differences and so you have to be able to operate with those with people that have different perspectives the size of teams and we talked about that in the last chapter when we're talking about groups the larger the size the more the the breadth the greater the breadth of understanding but the less effectiveness as far as being able to operate quickly so you want to be careful with the size of teams as well if you're trying to create team players you want to select train and reward appropriately you want to select people that are already going to be team players you know chick-fil-a when you walk in when you walk into chick-fil-a or you drive through there are people that are just like leaping out of their skins to say hi welcome to chick-fil-a you know you you can't train that you have to hire that right same thing with team players it's hard to train people to be team players you you're really better off hiring it but then when you do involve training create team players by working with each other helping them get along helping them work with what they have equipped them with what they need in order to get the job done and reward them appropriately if they engage in behaviors that are individualistic that should be punished if they engage in behaviors that lead to greater team coherence that should be rewarded and if all members are rewarded that way you're gonna get more of team players so what are the implications for managers effective teams tend to be small they tend to have fewer than 10 people preferably with diverse backgrounds effective teams have adequate resources and if management doesn't do that shame on management for not providing the resources that they need to to actually do their job effective leadership management has to either have leadership in the team or create an environment where they can have a leaderless self-managed team but you have to create that environment and then finally a climate of trust Trust has to be there or nothing's gonna really get done ok that's it thank you for your time and again what we talked about last week is going to apply to what we're talking about this week in a very large way so you might want to think through the concepts that we were talking about last week as you approach your material this week thanks for your time [Music]

Channel: Professor Gerdes | Management Professor | Author

Views: 17,961

Keywords: OB, Organizational Behavior, Chapter 10

Id: USVuzn8scLo

Length: 6min 11sec (371 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2018