6: Managing Groups & Teams

NOTE!: Over the next several lessons, I want you to view leaders as people who are making decisions on behalf of a team or group.

Teams – two or more people who work interdependently to accomplish some task related purpose – are an important part of organizational life. Teams can be described in terms of:

• team types,

• interdependence, and

• composition.

Relationships between team interdependence, performance, and commitment are very important to organizational behaviorists. Practical issues, such as how to compensate employees who work in teams fairly, are also very important considerations for this topic.

Teamwork can be looked at as a collection of team processes - a.k.a., the communication, activities, and interactions that occur within teams as the team pursues its goals and accomplishes its tasks.

Some processes are directly related to core team tasks. Other processes integrate or support the accomplishment of core tasks. Finally, other processes result in difficult-to-observe team states, including cohesion, potency, mental models, and transactive memory. To improve performance in team processes, organizations may include training in areas such as team building and team competencies.