Revealed: the secrets of successful team building
Teamwork offers various benefits to organizations and their employees. Teams of people with distinct areas of expertise and levels of experience complete different individual tasks to meet their organisation’s objectives. By working in teams, people build their practical experiences, push the frontiers of their knowledge and develop new skills.
Communication and co-operation are keys to teamwork success. Hence, effective and efficient teams’ structures are flexible and less hierarchical and all employees participate in the decision making process. Management spends a long time to structure effective teams, based on their understanding of the work environment interdependence between teams’ inputs and outputs.
In this article, I’ll simplify the critical factors that management consider in structuring teams and setting their compensation schemes to align organisation’s objectives with exogenous influences.
There are four basic types of interdependences between teams’ inputs and outputs - Pooled, Sequential, Reciprocal and Networked Intensive. They vary according to team members’ dependence on each other to complete their individual tasks and methods used to measure team performance.
Pooled teams are consistent with the classical definitions of groups. Sales teams are good examples for pooled structure groups, in which sales representatives don’t depend on each other to meet their individual sales targets, nevertheless the team’s performance is an aggregate of all the team members’ performance.
Sequential structure teams exhibit a different type of interdependence, which is clearly present in relay race teams. Runners depend on each other to complete their laps in the shortest time possible and the team’s performance is equal to the performance of the slowest runner – the weakest link.
