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Team Communication

Teamwork and team communication in today's workplace is vital in order for various tasks to be carried out efficiently. What is a team? According to Wikipedia a team comprise of a group of people linked to a common purpose. Businesses today rely on their employees to function and complete given tasks as structured units, or teams as we call them. This means that it is essential for employees to posses the capability to work and communicate in teams within their divisions (Wikipedia, 2007).

The process of communication breaks down when we take on the role of individualism and move out of our team setting. Communication is a process that allows organisms to exchange information using several distinct methods such as speaking, writing, or even nonverbal gesture such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, and eye contact. Communication also requires that all parties understand the common language that is being exchanged (Wikipedia, 2007).

Teamwork is the concept of people working together cooperatively. Elements to effective team communication are the wiliness to share information, wiliness to work out conflict and come up with solution to problems that may arise in a team, and to listen to each other (Crow, 2002).Working in a team can be difficult if one does not know how to communicate with their team members. Poor team communication can result in inferior quality of work or even die. In a great deal of professions today such as firefighters, police officers, soldiers and doctors poor teamwork and communication can result in death. According to Mayor, Susan Poor team work is killing patients (2002) lack of teamwork and communication contributed to insufficient improvement in a number of patients in England and Wales which results in some patients dying in three day.

In addition, ineffective team communication can be very costly to organization, for instance, if team members cannot communicate clearly with each other they may be unproductive or a task may take them longing than it should, thus time is wasted and money is loss. Challenges of communicating in a team are diversity, for example, a person in a may find something offensive because of his or her culture background. Conflict is another challenge in communicating in a team. According to DuPraw depending on where a person is from they may see conflict differently. Many culture view conflict as a positive thing, however there are some that believe that conflict should be avoided. For example, in the U.S., people try their best to avoid conflict; but when conflicts do occur they are often encouraged to face it head on. In fact, it is customarily recommend that persons in a conflict meet face-to-face to work through whatever problems exist. In contrast, in many Eastern cultures, open conflict is embarrassing or shameful; thus, they try to work out their differences quietly.

The importance placed on getting a task done or establishing a relationship differs from culture to culture; thus, forming a relationship at the beginning of a team project may be important to some team members. Whereas, other team members may think it is more important to get the task done and form a relationship while getting the task done. Some reasons why some culture look at relationship building and task oriented work differently are because they have different judgment on the rewards with completing a task. Also, cultures have different notions of time for example, Jamaican take the time to do things while Americans is always in a hurry. Another, reasons is that some cultures such as Asian and Hispanic tend to attach more value to developing relationships at the beginning of a shard task and more emphasis on task completion toward the