Running head: GROUP AND TEAMS PAPER
Group and Teams Paper
Charlene Marshall
University of Phoenix
Group and Teams Paper
Many people use the words group and team interchangeably, but there are a number of differences between a team and a group in real world applications. A number of leadership courses designed for the corporate world stress the importance of team building, not group building (Pollick, 2009). When a collection of people are brought together, diversity takes root. Diversity provides a wide range of abilities, knowledge, and strength. When individuals are accepting of diversity, a positive impact is the result. Diversity opens doors for growth and can be a learning experience for everyone involved. This paper will differentiate between a team and a group; focus on the importance of workplace diversity and how diversity relates to team dynamics in the workplace.
A team is a small group of people with complementary skills and abilities who commit to a common goal and approach for which they hold their members accountable (Mackin, 2007). On teams members share roles and responsibilities and are constantly developing new skills to improve the team’s performance. Teams identify and reach consensus on their common goal approach. When a member isn’t performing to the level required, the team addresses the performance problem (Mackin, 2007, para. 3). The strength of the team relies on the fact that the members of a team have similarities in the purpose and there is interconnectivity between the individual members (David, 2008). A team can be much more difficult to form. Selection of members of a team may be for their complementary skills, not a single commonality. For example, a business team may consist of an accountant, a salesman, a company executive, and a secretary. Each member of the team has a purpose and a function within that team, so the overall success depends on a functional interpersonal dynamic. Room for conflict is...