There are six factors that influence an individual’s identity with a team and how the team fulfills their personal needs. The six factors are Member Similarity, Member Interaction, External Competition/Challenges, Somewhat Difficult Entry, Team Success, and Team Size. Member similarity contributes to team cohesiveness, as people feel more comfortable with their own opinions when others have the same views. People are also more motivated to interact with other team members and find it easier to agree on team objectives when they are in a homogeneous group. This leads to a higher trust among members and less unnecessary conflict. An increase in the amount of time a team spends together will encourage better communication between team members and thus will result in a higher level of team cohesiveness.
The environment in which a team works plays an important roll in member interaction. This is why the physical layout of an office should be catered to the ease of communication between team members. The cohesiveness of a team increases when faced with external competition and challenging objectives. Working with others in a threatening situation plays an important roll in reducing stress. Furthermore, team cohesiveness is felt to be higher when an individual feels a challenging task would be better solved with a group effort rather than working alone. The ease of entry plays a roll in team cohesiveness. If it is somewhat difficult to become a group member, both the new and old members will feel that they have all gone through the same initiation and be closer because of it.
The Essay on Managed Team Members Management Group
A self managing work team is one that has the power to make its own decisions and direct all activities needed to reach its goal. This type of team is formed by management but once formed and given a goal, becomes self controlling. Team dynamics play a key role in the success or failure of the group. An essential step in the formation of a self managed team is the formation of team roles and ...
Team success increases the cohesiveness of a team through the belief that people like to be associated with success. The fact that a team is successful will instill confidence in the team to achieve future goals and objectives. This would result in more individual benefits over time. Team size also plays an important roll in the level of team cohesiveness. It is difficult to determine what the optimal team size should be as it is dependent on the parameters of the task. Therefore, the best team size should be as small as possible without overworking its members. 2. What is social loafing and what can be done to minimize it? Social loafing is the tendency for people to perform at a lower level when working in groups than when alone.
It can be minimized by keeping the number of team members to a minimum and making the task interesting and challenging. 3. My personal example of the stages of team development occurred last summer while I was working for Nesbitt Burns in their marketing/promotions department. I started in May and was put into a small group to run an inter-branch contest. This was the forming stage. It took a few days to get oriented with the people in the group as well as the office surroundings. I went out to lunch with my group members for the first week to become closer and discuss our strategy. We decided to divide up the responsibilities.
Since I was new I chose to write up a description of the contest, while the other three did other things like talk to people in a few of the branches to see if our contest was easy to understand. This was the storming stage. A few weeks later the contest was in full swing and by now we had gotten to know each other fairly well and felt comfortable with each other. (Norming Stage).
We would hold a team meeting three times week to discuss and implement any changes that we felt would better the participation in our contest. We were able to come to an agreement on what we felt was a good idea more quickly and efficiently.
(Performing Stage).
The contest only ran for two months, so when that time was up we were split up to do other things. (Adjourning Stage).
4. There are five major factors that effect team decision making. They are time constraints, evaluation apprehension, conformity, groupthink and group polarization.
The Essay on Learning Team Time Member Members
Team Behavior and Processes There are many important elements that effect how a learning team behaves and the processes that a learning team chooses to complete tasks and reach desired goals. The current learning team has established roles and responsibilities, time management skills, and decision making strategies that allow the team to work up to it's full potential. The learning team has ...
Time constraints are a problem when making a decision in a team because of logistics like the coordination of a meeting time and travelling time. It is also more difficult and time consuming to make a decision in a group because of the different opinions that individuals have within a group. Production blocking is a term used to describe group members who forget what they were going to say by the time they have a chance to say it. Production blocking increases when the size of a group is increased. Evaluation apprehension occurs when people in group meetings hold back comments because they feel they may be silly and time consuming and that the others are silently evaluating them. This feeling often prohibits good ideas from coming out in the conversation and ultimately hurts the group.
Conformity to the group’s norms is somewhat necessary to make decisions, but this often leads to the surpression of ideas by group members. Strong group conformity can prevent individual thinking and unique perspectives, which may lead to poor decisions. Groupthink is a phenomenon that exists in extremely cohesive groups. In this case, the group members are so concerned that everyone gets along that they will surpress their disagreeing comments to maintain the cohesiveness of the group. Group polarization is the tendency for teams to select a more risky strategy than they would have on their own. This is due to the fact that individuals feel less personally responsible for the decision if the strategy fails. Another reason that groups will make a more risky decision is because when one group member hears that another group member has the same extreme view, they are both reassured that their view could be correct.
Furthermore, individuals who are not comfortable with the risky decision at first become more comfortable with it the more it is discussed within the group. 5. There are many different techniques to improve team decision making. They include constructive controversy, brainstorming, nominal group technique, Delphi technique, and electronic brainstorming. Constructive controversy is any situation in which group members express and openly discuss different opinions and consider alternatives to a problem. An example of this type of decision making process is a meeting held by the Toronto Olympic Committee in deciding what stadium design would be suitable to host the 2008 Summer Games. Devil’s advocacy is a structured debate where half of the group members try and come up with faults in the preferred choice of the other half of the team.
The Term Paper on Decision-Making Technique: Brainstorming
... entire organization itself. References Bartle, Phil Brainstorming: structured Group Decision Making. Retrieved October 25, 2004 from: www.airworkers.net/exchange/20030430.html Janasz, ... market. There are several decision-making tools and techniques that a person or group can put to use ... group sets a predetermined order and goes around the room one at a time looking for ideas. This gives each member ...
This encourages criticism that may not have been expressed in a different type of group meeting. Brainstorming is a style of team discussion that encourages creative ideas. It is a face to face confabulation where as many alternatives to one problem are formulated without any criticism until the alternatives are exhausted. A group of politicians who want to reduce the amount of people going to hospitals for unnecessary treatment may use the brainstorming technique to come up with the best decision. Nominal group technique uses individual ideas as the basis for the alternatives. Each member’s idea is then explained and clarified to the rest of the group before they independently rank the alternatives. The nominal group technique approach would probably best be suited for groups who have high evaluation apprehension or groupthink.
St. Joseph’s Hospital in London, Ontario, used the nominal group technique approach when deciding on demonstration projects to improve its total quality management. Delphi technique integrates the opinions of experts who do not physically meet the group members and might not even know the identity of the group members. The information from the group is sent to the other expert for their opinion. The feed back is organized and returned to the group where changes may be made due to the expert’s feed back. After changes have been made the process is repeated until the group is satisfied with their decision. This technique has been used by the military to decide things like the optimal number of atomic bombs and strategic target sites.
The Essay on Small Group Technique Assertive Instructor
Assertiveness: Skills to Inspire Confidence INSTRUCTOR OUTLINE OUTLINE METHOD NOTES Introduction s PSI Class: Large Group Reg Class: Pairs interview / intro each other to class Participant intro + answer: PSI re: most memorable / proud moment during senior year Reg re: most imp t part of their job Objectives Lecture PG 1 Communication Styles Defined Small Groups/C paper on wall by tables O/H ...
The Delphi technique is an effective team decision making tool due to its structure but one draw back is that it takes a long time to come to a final decision. Electronic brainstorming uses specially designed software that allows people to enter ideas into a server like database, which can be accessed by anyone. These ideas can be accessed by other people to come up with new ideas, without incurring the dynamic problems that traditional brainstorming sessions can hold. Electric brainstorming can be used by organizations that have a physical disadvantage where it is difficult for its members to assemble in one location.
