What Contributes to a Team and an Individual Performance

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WHAT CONTRIBUTES TO A TEAM AND AN INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE

Ever since the existence of life on earth, one among many realities which can be stated is that life forms have always worked as teams throughout their phase of evolutions. It has been 200,000 years since the evolution of modern humans. The interpretations of the term “team” throughout this long era has been continuously updating. All ideologies and principles define team as “A group of people or other animals linked in a common purpose”. In present world run, it is correct to formulate that every work is intended to be carried out in teams. From organizations of IT to 7000m2 field ground of football, teams and team work are being demonstrated. So to generally understand a team definition, it is appropriate to term it as group of individuals carrying out a task having high complexity and interdependent subtasks.

                        To understand the functionality of a team, it becomes very important to reason what constitutes the work of a team. All global examples of creating developments through their works have been because those teams which knew what is important – teams work or individuals work. Rational thinking is that if any task is assigned to a group of individuals then it correspondingly intends that the work is not feasible by any one individual in it. If so, it defeats the sole purpose of calling it a team. Although exception are different as some instances do demonstrate that phenomenal working of one peer in the team led to final achievement of the desired. Even this doesn’t indicate that the individuals work can be superimposed on the team’s collective effort.

                This article desires to bring about a change to how people envision the success of a team. Success is the homogenous blend of both the teams and individuals work. It is how a member carries his assigned part of the task and aids the full functionality of other peer members in the group to demonstrate team work and the final success. Hence it is reasonable to state that better individual performances can possibly develop more chances of having success out of the task assigned. This possibility can only be guaranteed with involvement of team work. Analyzing the task undertaken by the team, stability of the team members and level of interdependency of work by each individual of the team helps to understand the link between individuals work and the final teams work.

IMPACT OF MEMBERS TEAM STABILITY:

                        If looked at team stability or member’s stability closely, patterns showing a positive impact on team performance is visible. Team stability means continual and longer span existence of the members of that team. This indicates the same members are grouped together for more than one projects which might need ignoring few of their individuals’ failure.

More precisely, the stability of team and its members impart common language and shared norms. Also the longer together stay helps facilitate creation of norms and trust within the group. Ex: Eisenhardt and Schoonhoven, 1990. Research suggest that for a team to excel together, it is must for them to have a standard work pattern which are known or familiar to all members. Comfortable environment with the working colleagues and the knowledge of how their co-worker perform tasks help enhance their own bit of effort towards teams performance. All these positively increments synchronicity and a better execution of required task (Berman et al., 2002; Weick and Roberts, 1993). In different terms, stability of teams, support the initiation of collective mind which intern helps as a base to hold interdependency. This mixture of stability and interdependency is a must to compose a real teams. In an interdependent framework of a group, ability of coordination and adaptability is imparted by formulating team stability. There is a scope for development as sufficient time is at the members’ disposal. Development could be in terms of individual progress or could be the development of a team as whole.

                        On the contrary, once a base of stability is provided yielding to collective minds, the possibility of its ill effects can be noticed. It becomes difficult to explain the limits of interdependence. The work process may get routinized to a limit which puts a wall to members putting efforts to gain creativity. The term “taking for granted” has a probability to evolve under these circumstances. With long durations of colleague exposure, there is a possibility of extending the “taking for granted” situation which could evolve into miscommunication and unconcerned behaviors of members with each other. Members over rely on past result yielding techniques they followed, which might constraint their willingness to step outside the box. New ideas becomes less received if the isolation gets out of hand. Over stability, or to be precise, unregulated stability has detrimental effects on team performances. Social loafing, over expectancies could be other down streams of over stabilizing teams.

                      An example to all these scenarios can be the change of Indian cricket team over the last decade span. Team lacked in their performance in terms of their capability. To overcome this issue, the captain played a tactical role of maintaining stability of team members. Rohit Sharma, the opening batsman had trouble starring to the international cricket standards. Underperforming for more than 25 matches, the captain didn’t lose his place in the squad. This stability in the team for Rohit kept motivating himself and as visible now from his career records, that those decision were core reasons. Sanath Jayasurya, one among the best captains of Srilanka cricket team debuted his career as a spin bowler. Initial stages of his career showed low results. Stability was still offered which gave the player an opportunity his other competitive skill as a batsman. He later turned out to be among the leading batsman of his times. As discussed earlier, over stabilization could lead to miscommunication and unconcerned behaviors, which was clearly the reason for with-in team issues of Indian Cricket team, in terms of conflicts between Harbhajan – Sreeshant and Gambhir – Kohli.