Management Strategies

TEAMS AND GROUPS IN ORGANIZATIONS

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Over the last decade, there has been rapid transformations on organizational designs and structures. Despite these transformations being triggered by economic, technological and strategic imperatives, there has been an increased job shifts in the organizations. Currently, organizations are focusing on shifting work from the individuals to team-based work structures. The ongoing transformation in the organization of work in the departments have captured attention of many managers as they have to consider the best incentives to apply in order for them to support the functioning of the teams and the work groups. Although some of the researchers attempt to make a distinction between work groups and work teams, there are no explainable differences between the two. The responses of the teams is facilitated by technological application in a way that it becomes easy to transform and ensure a sustainable functionality of the team. In most organizations the groups are initially formed and these later evolve to become viable and strong work teams that are more linked and united to fulfilling the set purposes. Leadership is consequently essential for any group or team in an organization so as to make sure that there is minimal wastage of resources as well as timely performance of the set functions. In the organizational setup, it is imperative to have active work groups and work teams. This is to ensure that there is effective handling of tasks and work has been duly broken down into manageable tasks. Group and team thinking is fundamental as through brainstorming, better ideas can be ideally reached. Thus, the team’s bad groups in the organization should be supported and facilitated to ensure a positive organizational growth.

        A team can be considered to be a small number of people who bear complementary skills and who are essentially committed to the same purpose, performance goals and the approaches they will be using to ensure tasks completion. In most cases, the teams usually derive their inherent power from the various work groups that evolve with the help of the organizational structure. For any group to fully become a team, there are several criteria that must be met. These include making leadership a shared activity. In this case, the leadership of the group becomes centralized to one individual or several individuals who ensure that there is a complete performance, peace and harmony in the evolved group. During the evolution process, the accountability of the individuals then changes from individual to both individual and collective (Tuckman & Jensen, 1977). The employees in the team becomes more accountable for their actions. During the process, the group develops its sole purpose and mission. This is imperative as it attempts to give direction and focus to the new team. The problem solving techniques are further integrated in the process as now they tend to become the way of life for the newly evolved team and not an activity for part-time. After setting of the mission and learning the effective problem-solving techniques, the group now measures their effectiveness (Tuckman & Jensen, 1977). This is implicitly done and measured by the collective products and outcomes of group. The organizational culture comes in handy during the process of the group evolving as it helps the members in managing the conflicts over authority and power. Through the guidance provided by a stable organizational culture, any unstable and interpersonal relations that might hinder the performance of the groups are duly handled. The needs of the team needs to be in consistent with the organizational strategy. In this regard, the level of participation and autonomy required to make the teams effective requires an organizational culture that critically values the processes.

        As the use of the teams have gained an increased appraisal in most organizations, research has been done to focus on the effective team leadership. The teams are central to the performance of the organization and research has followed suit to examine the role of leadership in teams. For example, researchers have tried to examine how the leaders can potentially help the teams through several couching activities (Wageman, 2001), the role of team leaders in managing of the team boundaries (Druskat & Wheeler, 2003) and how the traditional leadership theories can be applied in team leadership. In order to understand the leadership of teams, it is imperative to consider the nature of team functioning. From this understanding, it will be thus possible to articulate the leadership styles that are most effective. Functional leadership theory makes a suggestion that the role of team leadership is to get the work done. The most appropriate leadership style to apply in the team management relates to transformational leadership (Stewart et al. 1999). With this style, the leader is able to contribute to change as the leader attempts to prompt the highest level of motivation and commitment among the other team members. The transformational leadership style is best suited for multicultural teams as the leaders can essentially create an organizational vision that is vivid to elicit trust from all the group and team members (Stewart et al. 1999). Participative leadership style is also applicable to most groups and teams. This is attributed from the fact that it attempts to be engaging as it calls for the group and team members to give ideas and make insights into the achievement of tasks. Research reveals that once the team members are actively engaged by their leaders, they will be more productive.