Teamwork

Teamwork

  • Submitted By: Oanyoany
  • Date Submitted: 12/15/2013 10:46 AM
  • Category: Business
  • Words: 828
  • Page: 4
  • Views: 3

Society has always had a stake in how well people can work together and in their ability to work in groups. The use of teams, groups of people who work together on a specific task and whom are mutually accountable, became widespread in modern corporations. Therefore, teamwork became an essential skill for employees and it is important for firms to understand how to integrate different individuals into a cohesive workforce. Teams need commitment, motivation and trust to be effective and if a corporation doesn’t succeed in fostering an environment conducive to the formation of effective teams, the difficulties arising from the interactions between team members can impair a group’s efficacy. Effective groups offer the potential of synergy, and, in a business context, this synergistic effect translates into overall better results than the total of their members’ individual contributions (French et al., 2011).


Teams are considered to outperform employees operating individually by drawing from a wider range of skills and using the combined expertise of its members in the decision-making process and, consequently, improving the time required for reaching a decision and the quality of its implementation. Norman Triplett’s (1898) findings suggest that the presence of others can be beneficial to individual performance and lead to further research on the effects of social facilitation, which is currently defined as 'the tendency that individuals have to work harder when being watched by others' (cited in King and Lawley, 2013, p.164).
However, it is argued that employees do not achieve their full potential in a group setting due to difficulties that may arise between individuals. A group’s ability to fulfil a task can also be crippled by inefficient coordination between the members of the team and by challenges in the integration of their contributions. Steiner (1972), in his analysis of group productivity, assumes that a group does not achieve its potential...

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