Mock Exam | Effective Team Building in Organizations

Planning and task coordination involves coordinating and synchronizing activities among team members and establishing expectations to ensure proper balance of workload within the team.

Learning Orientation: A predisposition or attitude according to which building competence is deemed more important by an employee than demonstrating competence.

Team building involves training, normally conducted by a consultant and intended to facilitate the development of team processes related to goal setting, interpersonal relations, problem solving, and role clarification.

Team Building: Fun activities that facilitate team problem solving, trust, relationship building, and the clarification of role responsibilities.

Action processes are important as the taskwork is being accomplished. Sid is responsible for monitoring the team's progress toward its goals, which in turn contributes to action processes.

Action Processes: Teamwork processes, such as helping and coordination, that aid in the accomplishment of teamwork as the work is actually taking place.

Mental models refer to the level of common understanding among team members with regard to important aspects of the team and its task.

Mental Models: The degree to which team members have a shared understanding of important aspects of the team and its task.

One type of team training involves training members in the duties and responsibilities of their teammates. The idea behind this type of training, which is called cross-training, is that team members can develop shared mental models of what's involved in each of the roles in the team and how the roles fit together to form a system. What exactly does cross-training involve? Researchers have found that cross-training may involve instruction at three different levels of depth. At the shallowest level, there is personal clarification. With this type of training, members simply receive information regarding the roles of the other team members. At the next level of cross-training, there is positional modeling, which involves team members observing how other members perform their roles.

Cross-Training: Training team members in the duties and responsibilities of their teammates.

Is a cohesive team necessarily a good team? According to researchers, the answer to this question is no. In highly cohesive teams, members may try to maintain harmony by striving toward consensus on issues without ever offering, seeking, or seriously considering alternative viewpoints and perspectives. So how do you leverage the benefits of cohesion without taking on the potential costs? It is important to acknowledge that cohesion can potentially have detrimental consequences. One way to prevent the problems associated with cohesion would be to formally institute the role of devil's advocate. The person filling this role would be responsible for evaluating and challenging prevailing points of view in a constructive manner and also bringing in fresh perspectives and ideas to the team. Although the devil's advocate role could be filled by an existing team member, it's also possible that the team could bring in an outsider to fill that role.

Cohesion: A team state that occurs when members of the team develop strong emotional bonds to other members of the team and to the team itself.

Mental models refer to the level of common understanding among team members with regard to important aspects of the team and its task. A team may have shared mental models with respect to the capabilities that members bring to the team as well as the processes the team needs to use to be effective.

Mental Models: The degree to which team members have a shared understanding of important aspects of the team and its task.

Potency refers to the degree to which members believe that the team can be effective across a variety of situations and tasks. Team potency is promoted in teams in which members are confident in themselves and their teammates and when the team has experienced success in the past.

Potency: A team state reflecting the degree of confidence among team members that the team can be effective across situations and tasks.

Strategy formulation refers to the development of courses of action and contingency plans and then adapting those plans in light of changes that occur in the team's environment.

Team: Two or more people who work interdependently over some time period to accomplish common goals related to some task-oriented purpose.

Transition processes are teamwork activities that focus on preparation for future work. For example, mission analysis involves an analysis of the team's task, the challenges that face the team, and the resources available for completing the team's work.

Job Analysis: A process by which an organization determines requirements of specific jobs.

After-action reviews are systematic discussions and reviews of performance episodes.

Action Learning: Team process training in which a team has the opportunity to work on an actual problem within the organization.

Goal setting and performance management help establish specific and difficult goals for the team and monitors, evaluates, and provides performance-related feedback.

Feedback: In job characteristics theory, it refers to the degree to which the job itself provides information about how well the job holder is doing. In goal setting theory, it refers to progress updates on work goals.

Task conflict refers to disagreements among members about the team's task. Logically speaking, this type of conflict can be beneficial to teams if it stimulates conversations that result in the development and expression of new ideas. Research findings, however, indicate that task conflict tends to result in reduced team effectiveness unless several conditions are present. First, members need to trust one another and be confident that they can express their opinions openly without fear of reprisals. Second, team members need to engage in effective conflict management practices. In fact, because task conflict tends to be most beneficial to teams when relationship conflict is low, there are reasons to focus conflict management efforts on trying to reduce this aspect of conflict. Third, there is some evidence that task conflict may benefit teams when they are composed in certain ways. For example, task conflict has been shown to be most beneficial to teams comprised of members who are either emotionally stable or open to new experiences. Finally, the benefits of task conflict may be most evident when the conflict is positively skewed, or in other words, when the majority of the members of a team are unaware of the conflict that occurs among a few members of the team.

Interpersonal Processes: Teamwork processes, such as motivating and confidence building, that focus on the management of relationships among team members.

The different types of teamwork processes are transition processes, which deal with teamwork activities that focus on preparation for future work; action processes, which deal with important processes as the taskwork is being accomplished; and interpersonal processes, which relate to the manner in which team members manage their relationships.

Teamwork Processes: The interpersonal activities that promote the accomplishment of team tasks but do not involve task accomplishment itself.