Organizational Behaviour Assignment: Identifying Importance Of Team Effectiveness
Question
Task:
Instructions
Drawing on your experience working in the team, in addition to your knowledge of team effectiveness and other relevant topics covered in this course, your essay should focus on the following points:
• Define team effectiveness and briefly reflect on whether your team was effective according to this definition.
• Provide a brief overview of the team effectiveness model (Robbins et al., 2019). Drawing on the team effectiveness model, explain and reflect on two factors that (a) contributed to your team’s effectiveness and/or (b) were areas in which the performance of your team could have been improved. Your reflections should be clearly linked to theory and research. Note. Leadership is already covered in this essay, so leadership should not be one of these two factors.
• One of the elements within the team effectiveness model is leadership, which has an important impact on team functioning and effectiveness. Analyse your experience of leadership within your team and explain specific strategies you can employ to effectively lead teams in the future. Your reflections should be linked to theory and research on leadership.
Rationale for this organizational behaviour assignment
One of the underlying rationales for this subject is to make sense of the way people behave at work by combining multiple sources of knowledge (e.g., our own observations, reflections, experiences combined with theory and systematic research). Our ability to reflect on, and make sense of, our experiences, is an effective form of learning. Learning takes place when we reflect on our personal experiences and try to make sense of them with reference to existing and emerging understandings of the world (e.g., theories and systematic research). An important aspect of reflective learning is that it allows us to plan better ways of dealing with similar experiences in the future:
It is not sufficient simply to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting upon this experience, it may be quickly forgotten, or its learning potential lost. It is from the feelings and thoughts emerging from this reflection that generalisations or concepts can be generated. And it is generalisations that allow new situations to be tackled effectively. (Gibbs, 1988).
Reflecting on your experience working in a team, and linking these experiences to the concepts, theories, and research you are exposed to in this subject, is a particularly effective way to learn about team effectiveness and the impact of leadership in teams. These reflections will also guide you in more effective teamwork and leadership practices in the future. Reflective thinking is also a key step to critical thinking and analysis.
Overview of Individual Essay
For this assessment, you are asked to reflect on your teamwork experiences in relation to the planning of your team’s presentation for A2 in this subject. This will require you to take a step back from the experience and think about your key learnings elicited from working in a team. In addition to identifying your key learnings in the essay, you will need to link your key learnings to concept, theories, and research discussed in this subject.
To support your analysis, you need to cite at least 6 peer-reviewed journal articles. Articles that relate to these topics can be found in full-text format in databases such as ProQuest, Business Source Premier, and PsycInfo. Integrating literature throughout your essay provides the necessary depth to prevent your essay from being overly descriptive, allowing you to critically analyse your teamwork experience and plan strategies for more effective teamwork in the future. In your analysis, you could consider whether academic literature supports, contradicts, explains, or extends your key learnings and why (or why not) this may be the case. Be sure to conclude each analysis with a clear summary statement about the integration between your key learnings and the literature (i.e., creating summary statements of learning based on your integration of experience and evidence). You should also reflect on how you will apply your key learnings in your future team work.
Answer
1. Introduction
In organizational behaviour, as opined by Schwarz and Bennett, (2021), Team efficacy is the ability of a bunch of participants, generally with expertise, to operate together to achieve goals established by a command, staff members, or team captains. In the present organizational behaviour assignment, Teamwork models and leadership assist everyone in understanding the better management methods for achieving ideal team productivity.The key purpose of the essay is to identify importance of team effectiveness and reflect on my own team performance. I have analysed the study based on the application of team effectiveness model.
2. Main Discussion: Brief Overview of Team Effectiveness Model
Team Effectiveness
According to the view of Madsen, Townsend& Scribner,(2020), team effectiveness has been considered as a strategy based on which the cohesiveness among team members can be developed. The effective leadership and composition are two key factors to ensure the team performance.
Based on the above view, I can say that my team has effective leadership quality which has helped me to ensure the team skills.
Explanation of Team Effectiveness Model
The Robbins Team Effectiveness Model within organisational behaviour helps the employees to share their parts of information and create decisions that help each other to perform with their definite responsibility within their respective areas. Moreover, this generates positive synergy through coordinated efforts. Thus, as stated by Robbins et al., (2020), the individual's efforts and operations result in better performance in the workplace. However, there are certain types of team under the team effective model such as follows,
Virtual teams
Under these teams, individuals utilize the computer technology which ties together the physically dispersed individuals for achieving the common goals (Wood et al.,2015). Thus, this helps in the ability to overcome space and time constraints.
Hence, the team effectiveness model holds four categories of factors such are follows, Context: Adequate resources, Structure and leadership,Surrounding of trust,Evaluation of performance and rewards systems
Composition: Abilities of members, Allocation of roles, Personality, Team size, Diversity, Member preference and flexibility
Work design: Variety of skills, Identification of task, Significance of task, autonomy Process: General purpose, Specific goals, Efficacy of team, Conflict levels, Social loafing
Two factors from the model contributed to the team effectiveness
From the above Team Effectiveness Model, two factors that have contributed within the team effectiveness of my workplace are context and work designs. Initially, context includes adequate resources where my team depends upon the resources that help them to sustain and the resource scarcity decreases the abilities of the team performance and job effectiveness. Secondly, structure and leadership helps my team members where they are designated with specific jobs and it ensures all the members are equally contributing and sharing the workload. Moreover, the climate of trust helps in creating trust among the team members that has helped us in facilitating cooperation and bonding. Moreover, as stated byDarmawan et al., (2020),Performance Evaluationand providing reward enhances reflecting the team performance, employee performance development and so on.
Furthermore, Work Design helps in accomplishing the important duties; impactful teams must collaborate and take collaborative accountability. Hence, our team has become more than just a name only squad. Thus, variations inside the work design classification involve autonomy and freedom within my team, the capacity for using different skills and talents within the team, the opportunity to accomplish a complete and recognizable task or commodity, and operating on an activity that has a significant influence on each other within the our team. According to my views, these attributes boost member inspiration and efficiency. These work design attributes help in encouraging my team members because it enhances the members with the feeling of obligation and possession over the task and make the task more enjoyable to accomplish. Hence, both of these factors have successfully contributed within the succession of our team effectiveness that have increased the productivity and performance within the workplace.
Areas of performance to be improved
The areas that need to be improved within my team are Composition and Process. The factor of composition involves the variables which show how the team within my workplace needs to be staffed where the individuals must possess different kinds of skills and abilities along with technical expertise which were generally lacking within my team. Moreover, as opined by Luu and Narayan, (2017), it also involves Personality that is the significant individual behaviour and attitude towards others and seniors, allocation of diversity and roles where the team are created with individuals coming from diverse backgrounds and plays various roles allocated to them along with size of team consisting of 10 members. However, we have lacked on this ground as our teams were larger than size and there were misunderstandings created on certain situations. Furthermore, Process is the final category where a team shares the common purpose that offers commitment, direction and momentum which was missing from our workplace. Moreover, specific goals helps in translating the common purposes with clear communication, team efficacy encourages confidence among the members, conflict levels that helps on becoming stagnant and apathetic which improves the team effectiveness and lastly, social loafing where individual coast on the team efforts where individual; contribution could be identified.
However, in our team all such factors could be implemented through the help of Tuckman’s Five Stage Group Development Model that consists of
Forming: Members are forming because they are unsure regarding the team's mission, structure, and governance.
Storming: Dispute among group members and opposition to the restrictions is called storming and it enforces on individual identity.
Norming: It occurs when members create strong relations, cohesion, and a shared set of requirements for appropriate behaviour.
Performing: It reveals that the cohort is completely operational and the emphasis has shifted from discovering each other to job performance.
Adjourning: A group involved with finishing up operations rather than continuing them. Importance of leadership on team effectiveness As evidenced by Choi, Kim & Kang, (2017), effective team leaders maintain high team spirit and keep employees inspired to function well. Rulers could also influence self-esteem by fostering a cooperative environment among teammates, encouraging them to operate together to accomplish team objectives rather than focusing solely on individual priorities. Following strategies can be adopted in order to enhance the team performance.
Trait Approach
The effectiveness of leadership is linked with the personality, physical, social and intellectual traits that help in differentiating the leaders from the non-leaders. Hence, the trait approach of leadership reflects specific traits like Big Five Personality Trait and Emotional Intelligence that are highly linked with the leadership (Robbins et al., 2020). I can implement the strategy of trait approach for enhancing the team cohesiveness in the future.
Behavioral approach/Task oriented leadership strategy
This approach helps in identifying the behaviour of the efficient leaders regarding what should a leader do and perform for the improvement of the workplace. Moreover, this approach states that leaders are made and not born as leadership is considered as the set of skill that is to be taught and identification of effective leadership behaviour that helps in reaching the potential. Thus, effective leaders are considered to be relationship-oriented and task-oriented(Martins, 2020).
3. Conclusion
The present study focuses on the organizational behaviour with emphasizing on team effectiveness and leadership. Hence, the study focuses on explaining the team effectiveness model of Robbins that consists of context, composition, work design and process. Gradually, the study explains the two factors that have successfully contributed in team effectiveness and other two factors that are needed to be improved. Lastly, the study explains the significance of leadership in team effectiveness.
References
Choi, S. B., Kim, K., & Kang, S. W. (2017). Effects of transformational and shared leadership styles on employees' perception of team effectiveness. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 45(3), 377-386.
Darmawan, D., Mardikaningsih, R., Sinambela, E.A., Arifin, S., Putra, A.R., Hariani, M., Al Hakim, Y.R. &Irfan, M., (2020). The Quality of Human Resources, Job Performance and Employee Loyalty. International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, 24(3), pp.2580-2592.
Luu, S., & Narayan, A. (2017). Games at work: Examining a model of team effectiveness in an interdependent gaming task. Computers in Human Behavior, 77, 110-120.
Madsen, S. R., Townsend, A., & Scribner, R. T. (2020). Strategies that male allies use to advance women in the workplace. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 28(3), 239-259.
Martins, L. L. (2020). Strategic Diversity Leadership: The Role of Senior Leaders in Delivering the Diversity Dividend. Organizational behaviour assignmentJournal of Management, 46(7), 1191-1204.
Robbins, S. P., Judge, T., Edwards, M. S., Sandiford, P., Fitzgerald, M., & Hunt, J. (2020). Organisational behaviour.
Schwarz, R. M., & Bennett, L. M. (2021). Team effectiveness model for science (TEMS): Using a mutual learning shared mindset to design, develop, and sustain science teams. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 5(1).
Wood, J., Zeffane, R. M., Fromholtz, M., Wiesner, R., Morrison, R., McKeown, T., Factor, A., ... Osborn, R. N. (2015). Organisational Behaviour Core Concepts and Applications, 4th Edition Australasian. Melbourne: John Wiley & Sons.