Work Team V.S Sport Team

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Virtual teams This team uses computer technology to unite physically dispersed members and achieve a common goal. They approach each other through emails and social network. Nearly all teams today are able to do their work remotely. Challenges of building this team is that they suffer from poor relationship among team members as they have less social rapport and direct interaction and communication. According to researchers, virtual team are better at sharing unique information. Information held by each individual members but not entire group but overall they share less information. To sum up, low level of vitality will result in high level of information and the same with inverse direction. Firstly, trust must be established among team members. Even an inflammatory remark in email can severely undetermined team trust. Secondly, team progress must be monitored closely to keep track in achieving goals. Efforts and products of the team members must be publicized throughout the organization so the team does not become invisible like it doesn’t exist

Functional teams perform specific organizational functions and include members from several vertical levels of the hierarchy. In other words, a functional team is composed of a manager and his or her subordinates for a particular functional area. Accounting, personnel, and purchasing departments are examples of functional teams.

Cross functional teams are made up of employees in the same hierarchy level which is the experts in various specialties or functions working together on various organizational tasks. Team members come from diverse areas or between organization but different departments to exchange information, solving problems, develop new ideas and coordinate complex projects. Each of these employees have their specific expertise such as research and development, design, engineering, marketing, and distribution. These teams are often empowered to make decisions without the approval of management.

For instance, when Nabisco's executives concluded that the company needed to improve its relationship with customers and better satisfy customers' needs, they created cross-functional teams whose assignments were to find ways to do just that. Besides, Starbucks created a team of individual from production, global PR, global communication and U.S marketing to develop it’s via brand instant coffee. The team’s effort resulted in a product that manage to achieve cost effective to produce and distribute and marketed through a tightly integrated and multi-faced strategy. Moreover, Cisco relies on specific cross functional teams to identify and capitalize on new trends in several areas of software market. The teams are equivalent of social networking to identify business opportunities and implement them. Besides, all major automobile manufacturer like Toyota, Honda, Nisan, BMW and Ford uses cross functional teams as well.

Cross-functional teams takes time to build trust among team members. Although functional teams are usually permanent, cross-functional teams are often temporary, lasting for as little as a few months or as long as several years, depending on the group tasks being performed.

Self-managed work teams They only make recommendations and operate without managers. Some organizations have gone further by implementing solutions and are responsible for complete work processes or segments that deliver products or services to external or internal customers. Self-directed work teams are groups of 10 to 15 employees who perform highly related or independent jobs and take on many of the responsibilities of their former supervisors. Typically these tasks are planning and scheduling work, assigning task to members, make operating decisions, taking action on problem and working with supplier and customer.

Self-directed work teams (SDWTs) are designed to give employees a feeling of “ownership” of a whole job. For example, at Tennessee Eastman, a division of Eastman Kodak Company, teams are responsible for whole product lines—including processing, lab work, and packaging. With shared team responsibilities for work outcomes, team members often have broader job assignments and cross-train to master other jobs. This cross-training permits greater team flexibility.

Full self-managed work team even select their own members and evaluate each member’s performance. Supervisory positions are unnecessary. They actually do not manage conflicts well. When dispute arise, members stop cooperating and power struggles ensue which causes low group performance. Although individual on these teams report higher job satisfaction than others, they also sometimes have higher absenteeism and turnover rates.

Creating Effective Teams

Key components of effective teams in 3 general categories: Resources and other contextual influences that make teams effective, team’s composition and process variables which is the events within the team. Typically it has included objective measure of the team’s performance and aggregate measure of member’s satisfaction

Context: What are the factors that determine whether teams are successful?

Global context means the issue is looked at from a worldly perspective. In order to shift the employee from working alone to working with a group of members there are some difficulty to introduce working with others group members as a team. The effective team must have a common characteristics .To work as a team, the employee are required to cooperate with other members, sharing the information, have a good communication skills ,a positive attitude and there are still many characteristics and skills to allow a group of different people to work together and produce a wonderful result at the end. So, these are the three ways in which our understanding of teams differ in a global context:

Firstly, the team must have effective leadership. The effective leaders are able to set and achieve challenging goals, made a decisive action even in difficult situations, to outperform their competition, and by taking calculated risks and to persevere in the face of failure.

Besides is a climate of trust because the team members are reliable and a performance evaluation and rewards system that reflects the team contributions. These teams have individuals with technical expertise so different members have different task to do such as decision-making, problem solving and interpersonal skills and the right traits such as conscientiousness . For an example is that the disagreement is viewed as good. Disagreements are not suppressed or overridden by the group action. The reasons are carefully examined, and the group seeks to resolve them rather