Creating Effective Teams

• Effective teams are the foundation of every successful

organization. Companies without teams that work well
together often struggle, while effective teams help to
improve quality, facilitate the completion of projects and
increase productivity and efficiency.

• When we consider team effectiveness, we refer to such

objective measures as the team’s productivity, managers’
ratings of the team’s performance, and aggregate measures
of member satisfaction.
 Characteristics of an Effective Team

• Clear purpose • Open communication

• Informality • Clear rules and work
• Participation assignments
• Listening • Shared leadership
• Civilized disagreement • External relations
• Consensus decisions • Style diversity
• Self-assessment
 Context Composition
• Skills
• Adequate resources • Personality
• Leadership and • Roles
structure • Diversity
• Climate of trust • Size
• Performance evaluation • Members’ flexibility
• Members’ preference for
and rewards
teamwork

Team
Effectiveness
Work Design Process
• Common purpose
• Autonomy • Specific goals
• Skill variety • Team efficacy
• Task identity • Managed level of
• Task significance conflict
• Accountability
Autonomy Task Identity

Skill Variety Task Significance

Work Design Characteristics

Twenty-First Century Teamwork:
Virtual Teams
• Teams that seldom interact face-to-face and use computer
technology to tie together physically dispersed members in
order to achieve a common goal.
• They enable people to collaborate online – using
communication links such as wide-area networks,
videoconferencing, and email – whether team members
are only a room away or continents apart.
• With the greater availability of technology and increasing
globalization, virtual teams have become not only
possible, but necessary.
 Managing Virtual Teams

o Establish regular times for group interaction

o Set up firm rules for communication.
o Use visual forms of communication.
o Copy the good points of on-site teams.
o Give and receive feedback and offer assistance
on a regular basis.
 Managing Virtual Teams
o Agree on standard technology.
o Provide a virtual workspace.
o Note which employees effectively use email to build
team rapport.
o Smooth the way for the next assignment.
o Be available.
o Encourage informal, off-line conversation between
team members.
Are teams always the answer?
 Beware! Teams are not always the answer.

Despite considerable success in the use of teams, they are not necessarily
appropriate in all situations.

Teamwork takes more time and often more resources than individual work.
Teams, for instance, have greater communication demands, conflicts to be
managed, and meetings to be run. In their enthusiasm to enjoy benefits of
teams, some mangers have introduced them into situations where work is
better done by individuals.
Questions?
• Can the work be done better by more than one
person?

• Does the work create a common purpose or set of

goal for the people in the group that is more than
the sum of individual goals?

• Are the members of the group interdependent?