THE NATURE OF GROUPS AND TEAMS

Although some management experts do not make a distinction between groups and teams, in recent years there has been a gradual shift to an emphasis on teams and managing them to enhance individual and organizational success. Some experts now believe that the highest productivity results occur only when groups become teams. They see the two concepts as conceptually different, with groups being the more general of the two. All teams are groups, but not all groups are teams. Let's take a closer look.

A group has traditionally been defined as two or more individuals who com­municate with one another, share a collective identity, and have a common goal. Thus, a group can be virtually any size above one, as long as the members engage in some form of communication, maintain that they are a group, and have some common objective, be it weakly or strongly held. The United States Congress is a group, although few would call it a team. A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of perfor­mance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

Groups versus Teams

Table 1 points out some important differences between groups and teams. One major difference revolves around how work is done. Work groups emphasize individual work products, individual accountability, and even individual-centered leadership. In contrast, work teams share leadership roles, have both individual and mutual accountability, and create collective work products. In other words, a work group's performance is a function of what its members do as individuals, while a team's performance is based on collective products, what two or more workers accomplish jointly. Regardless of the team designation and platitudes of teamwork, the sales force at Gwatney Chevrolet in Memphis is still a group because its members are responsible solely for their own performance, they are managed individually, they are paid for individual performance, and there is minimal, if any, collaboration in serving customers. Because of the nature of the business, this working group may still be successful without being a real team. Contrast these salespersons to the EDS project teams, which indeed are teams. They must use their complementary skills in a highly collaborative fashion to solve customer problems. They share leadership and are evaluated almost totally on the final performance of the overall team effort. Without a common purpose, common objectives, and an agreed-upon common approach, they could not be successful, no matter how good they might be as individual performers.

One useful way to picture any work group is the extent to which it functions like a team. If you were to draw continuous lines between items in the left and right columns in Table 1, you could then treat the items as continuous dimen­sions along which groups could vary, from very individualistic groups, such as a company's geographically dispersed salespersons, to collective teams, such as EDS's highly interdependent professionals.

1. Which of these statements expresses the main idea of the text?

a) According to some experts, there is not a great distinction between groups and teams, because all teams are groups.

b) Groups and teams differ in the type of leadership, the character of accountability and the nature of work products.

c) In some businesses, a group can be successful without being a team.

d) A useful way to picture any work group is the degree to which it functions like a team.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1014