Discuss about the Team Work.
Team work is the basic necessity for every field these days. Not only the organisations but the students also have to work in teams in order to complete their tasks effectively (Watson, 2015). This reflective essay focuses on the roles in the team and the importance of the individual as the team member. The report also focuses on the area where the team has the scope of making improvements in the future. In order to understand the roles, it is required to understand some of the team dynamic theories.
A team can be defined as the group of members who come together and work for the similar purpose or goal. Each of the members of the teams should have the complementary skills so that each one of team can play their significant roles and make the team work efficient in nature. There are several factors and drivers that affect the team behaviour (Yammarino, Mumford, Connelly and Dionne, 2010). These drivers or the factors are called as team dynamics. Team dynamics focuses on the team nature and behaviour towards their work and towards each other. Team dynamics can be good or bad. Good team dynamic helps in better team performance while bad team dynamics results in lower performance of the team (Sugden and Punch, 2014).
It is required to clarify the roles of each and every member in the team in order to reduce the conflicts amongst the team members. It has been analysed that there are many theories that has been given by many theorists with regards to the roles of team members (Luoma, Hämäläinen and Saarinen, 2008). Belbin’s theory is one of the successful theories that can be implied here in this case to analyse the roles of the team members. The various roles that have been described by Belbin are resource investigator, coordinator, shaper, monitor evaluator, team worker, finisher, specialist etc. I have realised that I have played the role of a specialist and the team worker in the team. The following explanation clearly describes my roles and the importance of the same in the team.
Team worker: When any of the team is framed, it is required for all the members to work together. As every member has different roles in the team thus, team worker is the one who has a very important role to play. As far as the strengths of the team worker is considered, it has been analysed that team workers are cooperative in nature and also a very good listener (Aritzeta, Swailes and Senior, 2007). They believe in benefitting everyone and try to manage the conflicts in the team. As they are diplomatic in nature so it may be possible that they will not be able to take the decision in the crunch situations. This is the role that I have played in the team because I have all these characteristics in me. It has been analysed that I was the one who was familiar with each and every member of my team and this made me a mediator. In our team, I was the one who was familiar with everyone. This is because I provided them that form of comfort to talk to me and share their views. I have not intentionally taken up this role but it was automatically allocated to me because I acted as the mediator. I may not have helped the people with their work every time but I was the communicator between the two members of the team and usually resolved the issues by diplomacy. This is because I am the person who cannot hurt the sentiments of others and this can sometimes become my weakness because I won’t be able to take the final decision of the things. I can help people to avoid the issues.
Specialist: I consider myself as a specialist because I was the only one who was responsible for making the designing part of the ppt. the content was collected by some other people in my team but they knew that I am good in arranging the content and designing the slides so all the work at the end was my responsibility. A specialist is the one who can perform a specific task very well and he has the responsibility to complete the same in a team (van de Water, Ahaus and Rozier, 2008). Every member of the team depends on that person for that specialised work because the specialist has the knowledge and skills to do the same in the team (Costa, Passos and Bakker, 2014). When we started making the presentation, every member had taken up their roles. Now came the designing part, it was required that someone has to take out the meaningful information from the content that should be collected. The last part of the presentation was mine (Blenkinsop and Maddison, 2007). One of my friends had done all the work of the content and I was the one who had to do all the work of designing the slides and make them attractive enough so that our presentation can draw the attention of the audience. I can be considered as the finisher also because I have to give the last touch to the overall presentation.
As far as the performance of our team is confided, it has been analysed that everyone has done their part very well. The end presentation was good and all were satisfied with their performance but the part that has been realised to be missing was the better communication and mutual understanding of work. I have realised that nobody in our team was communicating with each other. Everyone has divided their work and done the work accordingly. We have the capability to make out something more creative and out of the box. This is because each of the members in our team has some or the other talent and integrating all the things would have helped us to make the presentation outstanding. There are several strategies that we can use in future to make better team work performance and dynamics and these are:
Better communication flow: this is the most important and the required strategy to be implemented (Abreu, Caldeira, Costa, Gomes and Roque, 2016). Enhancing communication flow helps in reducing the conflict between the members of the tea and the members of the team can easily share their opinions with each other (Lee, Gillespie, Mann and Wearing, 2010). When more than one opinion rises then the better solutions can be concluded for the problem.
Helping each other: This is the most important thing that is required to make the team effective in nature. Helping each other results in better team dynamic and behaviour. If the team members help each other than they develop a sort of relationship that also reduces the conflicts that may rise when more than one or two members work together (Dennis, Fuller and Valacich, 2008).
It has been analysed that the scope of performance improvement lies in the area of communication. This is because better communications the key for successful team work d if this is improved than our team will perform more effectively the next time. We will try to develop a sense of informal relationship with each other along with formal relationships that we can learn to compromise on some of the things and can understand each other better.
Conclusion:
It has been concluded from the report that team dynamics can be defined as the drivers or the factors that affect the team behaviour. If the team dynamic are bad then it results in bad team behaviour and if the team dynamics are good then it results in improved team performance. As far as our team is considered, I have played the role of team workers and the specialist, both the roles are very important and thus I can say that I was the important part of my team. each and every person have done their tasks well but the area where we lack was the area of communication and understanding which is considered as the most important and the key part of team dynamics and effectiveness (Gurtner, Tschan, Semmer and Nägele, 2007). Some of the strategies like making informal relationship and better information flow we can improve this area of weakness of our team and hope it will help us in future to perform more effectively than this time.
References:
Abreu, S., Caldeira, A., Costa, A.R., Gomes, T. and Roque, L.A., 2016, October. Interdisciplinary team work applying working methods to a math project. In Engineering Education (CISPEE), 2016 2nd International Conference of the Portuguese Society for (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Aritzeta, A., Swailes, S. and Senior, B., 2007. Belbin’s team role model: Development, validity and applications for team building. Journal of Management Studies, 44(1), pp.96-118.
Blenkinsop, N. and Maddison, A., 2007. Team roles and team performance in defence acquisition. Journal of Management Development, 26(7), pp.667-682.
Costa, P., Passos, A.M. and Bakker, A., 2014. Empirical validation of the team work engagement construct. Journal of Personnel Psychology.
Dennis, A.R., Fuller, R.M. and Valacich, J.S., 2008. Media, tasks, and communication processes: A theory of media synchronicity. MIS quarterly, 32(3), pp.575-600.
Gurtner, A., Tschan, F., Semmer, N.K. and Nägele, C., 2007. Getting groups to develop good strategies: Effects of reflexivity interventions on team process, team performance, and shared mental models. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102(2), pp.127-142.
Lee, P., Gillespie, N., Mann, L. and Wearing, A., 2010. Leadership and trust: Their effect on knowledge sharing and team performance. Management learning, 41(4), pp.473-491.
Luoma, J., Hämäläinen, R.P. and Saarinen, E., 2008. Perspectives on team dynamics: Meta learning and systems intelligence. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 25(6), pp.757-767.
Sugden, F. and Punch, S., 2014. The challenges and benefits of employing a mobile research fellow to facilitate team work on a large, interdisciplinary, multi-sited project. Research in Comparative and International Education, 9(4), pp.441-453.
Van de Water, H., Ahaus, K. and Rozier, R., 2008. Team roles, team balance and performance. Journal of Management Development, 27(5), pp.499-512.
Watson, L.M., 2015. Brief communication: Does feeling part of the team affect other characteristics of nursing teamwork?. Canadian Oncology Nursing Journal/Revue canadienne de soins infirmiers en oncologie, 25(1), pp.99-100.
Yammarino, F.J., Mumford, M.D., Connelly, M.S. and Dionne, S.D., 2010. Leadership and team dynamics for dangerous military contexts. Military Psychology, 22(S1), p.S15.
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