Teamwork is the process of working collaboratively with a group of people in order to achieve a goal. It involves several associates working together with each playing a part but all subordinating personal prominence for the efficient completion of the collective task as a whole. Teamwork enables people to cooperate, using their individual skills and providing constructive feedback, despite any personal conflicts that may exist between individuals. Teamwork in the workplace offers employee within an organization a chance to learn how to work together. The importance of teamwork at work is vital to the success of any organization.
Teamwork in the workplace offers the organization and its staff the ability to become more familiar with each other and learn how to work together. The importance of teamwork at work is vital to the success of the organization and to the development of each employee. Understanding those important elements will assist in developing organizational policies geared toward encouraging team growth in the workplace.
A team that works well together understands the strengths and weaknesses of each team member. One of the benefits of strong teamwork in the workplace is that team leaders and members become proficient at dividing up tasks so they are done by the most qualified people. Without strong teamwork, it can be difficult for managers and executives to determine which staff members can best accomplish job tasks.
Work groups and teams develop systems that allow them to complete tasks efficiently and quickly. When a task is handed to a well-trained and efficient team, the team’s work pace assures that the task will be completed quickly and accurately. This allows the organization to take on more work and generate more revenue without having to add more staff. This becomes helpful when efficient teams from different departments work together. Each team is well aware of its own abilities and the groups can work together effectively as opposed to disjointed groups of employees who may not be familiar with how to work together.
Teams in the workplace often meet to discuss how to solve the organization’s issues. When a team works well together, it allows staff members to feel more comfortable in offering suggestions. Team members become accustomed to processing brainstorming information, and the company benefits from the variety of suggestions that come from effective teams.
A strong team environment can act as a support mechanism for staff members coping with the day-to-day workplace challenges. Work group members can help each other improve their performance and work together toward improving their professional development. Team members also come to rely on each other and trust each other. These bonds can be important when the team faces a particularly difficult challenge or if the group is forced to deal with the loss of a team member while still trying to maintain productivity.
There is an interesting relationship between the ideas of workplace teams and the various organizational cultures, structures and systems contained within. There is evidence of team management in the professional business literature indicating that work teams provide many positive effects to an organization. However, this raises the question as to how do organizational culture, structure and system support teamwork within that organization. Three of the most powerful factors in shaping the context of teamwork development are the organization’s culture, structure and systems.
Culture is the most significant factor in team development. While powerful, organizational culture is often difficult to detect and change. An organization’s culture represents the basic shared values and assumptions held by most people in the organization. It defines what things are viewed as right or wrong, what is valued, how one gets into trouble, and how people are expected to see the whole corporate world. It is critical to the collaborative team organization that the shared culture emphasize that teamwork is essential and that people at all levels can get into trouble if they do not collaborate with others and respond readily as members of the team. If the culture is either openly or passively resistant to the importance of teamwork, any attempts to foster collaboration, participation or involvement will be seen as a temporary action or a management manipulation.
The work culture depicts the shared values and assumptions of an organization, which are required to be followed by the team members. It determines the perception of team members for determining a particular process or work right or wrong. The shared culture in team collaboration emphasizes on team work would be effective to increase the ability of team members to meet the challenges as people from diverse culture would work toward a single objective. But at the same time, if people do not collaborate with others in a team and do not work together, there is bound to be challenges in coordination and performance will consequently be affected.
Structure refers to the basic design or the organization as represented in the organization chart. It reflects authority, communication patterns, and the responsibility for certain functions in the organization. Organizational structure largely determines who works with whom and whether teams are designated formally to carry out organization tasks. Although all organizations have informal groups that form for a variety of reasons, the formal organization structure can encourage and support teamwork, or it can make it much more difficult for teams to form and function effectively. Organizations that rely on an organization structure that fails to account for the teamwork across the various functions, tend to foster conflict, miscommunication and poor coordination.
Systems are the agreed-on methods for doing work in the organization. These integrated agreements or systems, regulate almost all aspects of organizational life. Pay systems, evaluation and promotion systems, decision-making systems, and management information systems are all examples of this component. It is critical that the systematic aspects of the organization support team development. People may encounter major problems in an organization when attempting to build teamwork into the organization if the pay systems are based entirely on individual performance for example, or if information is given only to individual senior managers rather than all team members.
A major part of learning to administer an organization, consists of correctly observing, identifying and understanding the character and personality of an organization.. Understanding an organizational culture is essential to identifying the complex and often esoteric dynamics and features of a workplace. Such understanding is clearly essential for a manager to any attempt to bring change or new ideas like the concept of team management into a group. An administrator or even a manager must make certain that the organizational culture is capable of being receptive to the innovations that are being considered. The wrong culture can sabotage vision, sandbag goals, and undermine values.
An organizational culture conveys a sense of identity to those who work within it and to those who come into contact with it. In addition, it conveys to staff what is unique about the organization and what sets it apart from other organizations. It instills a sense of value and purpose to what takes place as a result of the organization’s activity and it provides collective commitment to the organization. It also promotes system stability, which is the extent to which the work environment is perceived to be positive and reinforcing. It further provides a rationale for the workplace and allows people to make sense of what the organization is all about.
A healthy organizational culture is analogous to the healthy personality of an individual. A healthy person must have a clear sense of self, established ethics and values, a sense of purpose and self-control and a reason for being; hence, an organizational culture is the collective personality of an organization and must embody those same attributes. In this way, potential obstacles to teamwork may be identified and possibly modified. Tata and Prasad found that “Work teams change the way people interact and work in organizations. The implementation of teams is context-dependent, the success of which can depend on the alignment between team-level and organizational-level structural factors.
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