Structuring Teamwork: Key Issues And Solutions

Literature Review

Write an essay on Structuring teamwork.

Structuring teamwork has become the fact of the organizations in recent times. Organizations believe that team-oriented work can contribute more towards the performance, productivity and employee satisfaction and consequently the success. Effective teams require efficient leaders and the leadership skills matter the most to make the people work together effectively. From the present case study, it can be seen that Dharma has been efficiently handling ‘Helping Hands’ since five years and under her able leadership, the organization was growing steadily. Due to the increasing workload, she had to handover the team leadership responsibilities to Jenny, who has been an efficient employee of the not for profit organization for five years. Dharma did not have the time to train her as the changes happened very quickly. However, after the appointment of Jenny to the new role and responsibility, there had been chaos in the team and it was on the verge of breaking down. The staff members broke down into groups with conflicts among them and Jenny criticized them publicly over their mistakes.

From the case study, the identified key issues were that Jenny was not trained to be a leader and even after being a diligent employee, she lacked leadership skills. Her lack of leadership skills, management decisions, team building efficiencies and managing staff members was the reason for all the pitfalls that the organization faced during the change period. The present report will critically analyze the problem and recommend effective solutions.

The decision of the management towards the employees of an organization can have deep impacts on their efficiency and effectiveness. The way in which the management makes the decision, interacts with the employees and delegates the responsibilities affects the entire organization. The leadership style of the management can have direct effects on the output of the organization (Michalski 2012). Leaders who fail to solicit the input of the employees often found to distort the information required to fit the needs. One-sided decisions made by the management without considering the voice of the employees significantly reduce the efficiency and effectiveness, resulting in employee dissatisfaction and decreased productivity (Eccles, Ioannou and Serafeim, 2014).

Efficient leadership is the key to motivation as it affects the employee behavior and motivates them to accomplish the goals of the organization. Along with this, motivation also helps the employees to achieve their career and personal goals, which is very important from the perspective of mutual success and growth of the employees and the organization. Motivation and leadership are interactive and the effectiveness of leadership is dependent on the ability of the leaders to motivate the employees towards a collective mission, vision and goal (Day et al. 2014). Therefore, the leaders should be well aware of their expertise and ability to bring out the best of their employees.

Problem Analysis

Building up a cohesive team is another important aspect of the leadership skills because a strong and cohesive team has the ability to achieve anything. Trust is the foundation for building up the cohesiveness and without it, the team is simply a collection of individuals (Tseng and Yeh 2013). However talented the employees may be, if there is no cohesiveness, they will never be able to achieve full potential. With the incorporation of trust, the individuals become stronger as they are no longer considered alone but part of a cohesive and effective team. With mutual trust, the team will be motivated to achieve the meaningful goals of the organization (Wei and Wu 2013).

Managing the staff members in the periods of change is an important action of the leader as change brings about personal impact on the employees of the organization. Change management facilitates the management and the leaders to handle change effectively and helps to address the wider and tangible impacts of the change. The leader should focus on the employees and ensure that the change is applied smoothly and thoroughly, with lasting implementation (Cameron and Green 2015). The challenges emerged due to the change have to be thoroughly analyzed by the leader with respect to the responsibilities and activities of the employees of the organization.

From the literature research, the various theoretical approaches have been discussed that can have positive impacts on the leadership abilities. Critically analyzing the literature with respect to the case study can exhibit a bigger picture of the issue.

The decisions of the management affect the organizational effectiveness and efficiency. This factor is quite evident from the case study where the decision of Dharma proved to be faulty one for Helping Hands. She appointed Jenny to a management role that was newly created without consulting her employees. The criteria for her selection of Jenny for the senior position was her past records of high levels of commitment and motivation to the families and organizations that Helping Hands work for. However, Dharma neither estimated the leadership abilities of Jenny nor gave her the required training. Therefore, her decision of appointing Jenny affected the organization badly.

Effective motivation is an important characteristic of leadership where Jenny was an absolute disaster. It is common for the employees to commit mistake and this should be handled professionally, without hurting the self-respect of the employees. However, Jenny took the extreme step to criticize the staff members publicly and insulting them on their mistakes. This caused them to take the decision of leaving the organization and the attrition rate increased rapidly. Instead of motivating the employees, Jenny de-motivated, criticized and insulted them.

Conclusion

Building up a cohesive team is a crucial point for achieving the goals of the organization. Instead of building up a cohesive team, the leadership of Jenny made the staff members to break up into two different groups and created a conflict among them. There has been a thorough breakdown in the teams after Jenny took up the responsibility and this was not accepted well by the employees. They decided to leave the organization without getting into the tension that flicked due to the employee dissatisfaction.

Managing the staff members efficiently in the periods of change leads to the building up of a well-structured organization and developed teams. Again, Jenny was a complete failure in this as employees felt that they were not important to the organization and not valued anymore. During the transition period, Jenny failed to be aligned with the team members and failed to develop a better and efficient team and caused the team members to fall apart. Thus, the entire concept of appointing Jenny as the management leader proved to be a complete blunder that was made abruptly.

Conclusion

From the above report, it can be said that Dharma had the superficial concept of the performance of Jenny and she was not aware of her managerial abilities. This lead to a crisis in the organization especially when it was growing. Kerzner (2013) opined that the management should adopt a methodology for effective implementation of its decisions. Abrupt decisions can only affect the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization. However, Robbins et al. (2013) argued that the management decisions related to the policies of human resource, cultural factors and structural design could determine largely the innovation levels within the organization. Both the literature point towards a common factor that management decisions should be planned rather than abrupt to avoid the pitfalls.

Daft (2014) stated that the feedback and attention of the supervisor provides a psychological boost to the employees and motivates them and the path-goal theory explained by the author demonstrated this fact rationally, with the possibilities to increase motivation. On the contrary, Hackman and Johnson (2013) put forward the theory that effective leaders demonstrate a stronger motivational leadership when compared with the leaders who do not have a strong need for power. From all these arguments, it is obvious that all the literature claim that strong leadership skills are very much important for the success and growth of an organization and as it was missing in Jenny, Helping Hands was in a terrible position.

Recommendations

 To get rid of the present turmoil situation, Dharma needs to appoint a leader with efficient leadership skills, who will focus on building up a well-developed team. An effective team is focused towards the goals of the organization and the leader makes them understand the bigger picture. Each member of the team must have a clear context of his or her responsibilities as it increases commitment, improves quality and promotes collaboration. The leader should set a common goal for the entire team that is clearly relevant to the tasks of the team (McFarlane and Cooper 2014). Working and understanding towards achieving these common goals increase the effectiveness of the team drastically. Measurable metrics associated with the goals determine the improvement and effectiveness of the team. The collaboration of the team as a single unit will increase the interdependency awareness of the members. The leader should encourage interdependency and collaboration as it would tend to reduce the blaming behavior and the potential opportunities for improvement and learning will get stimulated (Yukl 2012). The leader should work towards providing the necessary structure and support for the team by putting the right people together. The natural skills of the members should be considered while their selection in the team and even distribution of the work among them.

References

Cameron, E. and Green, M., 2015. Making sense of change management: a complete guide to the models, tools and techniques of organizational change. Kogan Page Publishers.

Daft, R., 2014. The leadership experience. Cengage Learning.

Day, D.V., Fleenor, J.W., Atwater, L.E., Sturm, R.E. and McKee, R.A., 2014. Advances in leader and leadership development: A review of 25years of research and theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), pp.63-82.

Eccles, R.G., Ioannou, I. and Serafeim, G., 2014. The impact of corporate sustainability on organizational processes and performance. Management Science, 60(11), pp.2835-2857.

Hackman, M.Z. and Johnson, C.E., 2013. Leadership: A communication perspective. Waveland Press.

Kerzner, H.R., 2013. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

McFarlane, D.A. and Cooper, T.V., 2014. Brief Synthesis of Team Leadership Effectiveness and Performance. Management and Administrative Sciences Review, 3(2), pp.221-225.

Michalski, G., 2012. Accounts receivable management in nonprofit organizations. Available at SSRN 2193352.

Robbins, S., Judge, T.A., Millett, B. and Boyle, M., 2013. Organisational behaviour. Pearson Higher Education AU.

Tseng, H.W. and Yeh, H.T., 2013. Team members’ perceptions of online teamwork learning experiences and building teamwork trust: A qualitative study. Computers & Education, 63, pp.1-9.

Wei, L.Q. and Wu, L., 2013. What a diverse top management team means: Testing an integrated model. Journal of Management Studies, 50(3), pp.389-412.

Yukl, G., 2012. Effective leadership behavior: What we know and what questions need more attention. The Academy of Management Perspectives,26(4), pp.66-85.