Group vs Team

8 Key excerpts on "Group vs Team"

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  Communicating Successfully in Groups

  A Practical Guide for the Workplace

  • Richard Hammersley, Marie Reid(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Modern life is full of lots of things called teams such as Telephone Sales Teams; Management Teams; Quality Assurance Teams; Food Services Teams; Surgical Teams; Social Work Teams; Community Psychiatric Teams; Drug Action Teams. All of these, or the many other groups called teams, lose their right to be called teams if they don’t interact properly, or share common goals. Many work groups which would resent being renamed teams may well function as teams. From here on, we will be using ‘team’ in a technical sense, to refer to a workplace group with certain positive characteristics.

  So what is a team? A team is a group of people at work who:

  • Work together regularly towards agreed common goals.
  • While in the team, regard their team identity as a main feature of their workplace identity.
  • Who have largely open communication among themselves.
  • Are in the team because of their individual characteristics, although some teams are formed out of whoever is available.
  • Who usually adopt a variety of different roles within the team.

  Nature of teams

  As with group development there is also a growing emphasis on the importance of team building and team development in the workplace. This is particularly the case in large businesses and commercial organisations, where more and more people consider effective teamwork to be the thing of the future. Hence the move towards a greater emphasis on teamwork in the workplace, although there has recently been a backlash questioning whether teams actually work in practice. Our view is that teams are hard to build and easy to damage. The failure of teams to deliver reflects these difficulties, but the ideal of the effective team is still worth working towards. By this stage in this book you should appreciate that we have to work in groups whether we like it or not and there is no real alternative to trying to develop effective workplace groups. A team is an effectively-functioning group.

  Permanence of teams

  Teams may be formed for particular tasks, disbanding when the task is over. Some companies encourage this sort of flexibility; well-known examples include W. L. Gore (manufacturers of Gortex) and Microsoft. Or teams may be permanent and work on a number of tasks of different kinds over the years. Long-established teams may come to get along extremely well and work effectively together. However, they may also become stale, resistant to change and inward-looking. They may shut out the outside world. Long-established team members may also come to attribute their success to unique personal characteristics. For example, they may regard the charisma of their leader as essential. If key people leave, then the team may no longer function effectively.

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  Industrial and Organizational Psychology

  Research and Practice

  • Paul E. Spector(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

   Explain the four important group and two important team concepts.  Summarize the findings on group performance.  Talk about the advantages and disadvantages of group diversity.  Discuss the procedures that can be used to enhance work group and team performance. Work Groups Versus Work Teams  297  WORK GROUPS VERSUS WORK TEAMS A work group is a collection of two or more people who interact with one another and share some interrelated task goals. These two characteristics — interaction and interrelatedness — distinguish a group from just a collection of people. A university department faculty is a work group. The members of the faculty interact with one another from time to time, and they have interrelated goals involving the education of students. Each faculty member teaches courses that, taken together, constitute the requirements for the major course of study. On the other hand, all of the students of the university are not a group because they do not all interact with one another, although subsets of them do, and they do not all share interrelated goals. Rather, each student has an individual goal that is unrelated to the goals of other students. A work team is a type of work group, but a team has three specific properties (M. A. West, Borrill, & Unsworth, 1998): 1. The actions of individuals must be interdependent and coordinated. 2. Each member must have a particular, specified role. 3. There must be common task goals and objectives. For example, each person on a surgical team has a specific role. A surgeon does the cutting and sewing, a surgical nurse assists and hands instruments to the surgeon, and an anesthesiologist keeps the patient unconscious and monitors vital signs. The actions of these people are coordinated. The cutting cannot begin until the patient is asleep. The surgeon cannot sew unless the nurse hands him or her the tools. There is a common goal of successfully completing the surgery without losing the patient.

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  Organizational Behavior

  • Michael A. Hitt, C. Chet Miller, Adrienne Colella, Maria Triana(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  We began by discussing the nature of groups and teams, and their different forms. Then we addressed the criteria that should be used to determine whether a team is effective, and the factors that influence team effectiveness. Next, we exam- ined how teams develop over time. Finally, we described ways in which organizations and leaders can promote team effectiveness. To summarize, we focused on the following points: • A group can be defined in very general terms as “two or more interdependent individuals who influence one another through social interaction.” A team is a group that consists of two or more people who work interdependently within an organization, with tasks that are relevant and consequential for the organization’s mission, and who are identified as a team by people within and outside the team. • Groups and teams can be classified in a number of ways. Both informal and formal groups arise in organizations. People in organizations often belong to identity groups based on their social identities, such as gender identity, racial identity, or religious identity. Types of teams include virtual teams, functional teams, and self-managing teams. The type and purpose of the team can affect how the team develops and functions. • Team effectiveness is measured in terms of the team’s learning and cognition, team members’ feelings about the team, and team outputs and viability. • The composition of the team influences the team’s effective- ness. The diversity of members, their personalities, and the size of the team all influence team effectiveness. • The structure of a team, including the roles held by mem- bers, the norms, and the task structure, can all influence a team’s effectiveness. • The processes used and experienced by the team also influence team performance. Team processes include team cohesion, conflict among team members, social facilitation, social loafing, and communication.

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  Organizational Behaviour

  • Paul Smith, Marilyn Farmer, Wendy Yellowley(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The CIPD (2011) defines a team as a ‘limited number of people who have shared objectives at work and who co-operate, on a permanent or temporary basis, to achieve those objectives in a way that allows each individual to make a distinctive contribution. From this definition we can see that key aspects of team-working are:

  •   shared objectives, which assumes that everyone has had a say in and a chance to create agreed goals

  •   cooperation, which is necessary for effective team-working

  •   making a distinctive contribution – utilizing the diverse set of skills and experience of team members

  •   a limited number of people – the ideal number of people to make up an effective team has been the focus of much research.

  Clegg, Kornberger and Pitsis (2005) also introduced the concept of collective responsibility, and suggest that a team differs from a group in that individuals are more ‘psychologically’ aware of each other and become interdependent. This is an important point, as the key aspect of being a member of a team is the emotional link and commitment to common goals. So while a group of people waiting in a queue to see the latest rock band all have a common purpose, they would be classified as a group of individuals and not a team. In contrast, a football team has a fixed number of players, everyone has a role and a contribution to make, and co-operation is critical to achieving the shared objective.

  Other authors introduce additional perspectives of a ‘team’. Kozlowski and Bell (2003), for example, refer to the organizational context in which the team operates, which will influence, constrain and impact on the way the team-members work together. Factors such as location, resources and technology will all play a part in how the team operates.

  KEY TERM

  Team: a group of people who work together and have shared goals, cooperating and working towards achieving their goals.

    5.3 Why are teams important?

  In Chapter 10

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  Industrial and Organizational Psychology

  Research and Practice

  • Paul E. Spector(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Teams can be found in factories, hospitals, schools, and stores. Any job that requires the coordinated actions of more than one person can involve teams. Not all groups of people in organizations work in teams, however. In many work settings, we find groups of people who work relatively independently but still come in contact with one another. College professors, salesclerks, security guards, and teachers often do most of their work without the help of cow- orkers, although they come into contact with many other people in their organizations doing similar work. Even the most independent employees are affected by the behavior of others with whom they interact at work. In this chapter, we turn our attention from the individual employee to groups of employees. We will see how the behav- ior of individuals is very much affected by the behavior of other people in the work environment. One cannot fully understand Work Groups and Work Teams Work Groups Versus Work Teams 281 Work Groups Versus Work Teams A work group is a collection of two or more people who interact with one another and share some interrelated task goals. These two characteristics—interaction and interrelatedness—distinguish a group from just a collection of people. A university department faculty is a work group. The members of the faculty interact with one another from time to time, and they have interrelated goals involving the education of students. Each faculty member teaches courses that, taken together, constitute the requirements for the major course of study. On the other hand, all of the students of the university are not a group because they do not all interact with one another, although subsets of them do, and they do not all share interrelated goals. Rather, each student has an individual goal that is unrelated to the goals of other students. A work team is a type of work group, but a team has three specific properties (West, Borrill, & Unsworth, 1998): 1.

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  Business Organisation for Construction

  • Chris March(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7

  Team or group working

    7.1 Introduction

  Unlike most other industries, there is less opportunity for the majority of construction personnel to develop long-term working relationships with other employees. This is because by the very nature of the business, a project manager is selected for a project and whilst they may choose some of the personnel, many of the rest are provided for the project as required or when they can be freed up from another project. Add to this that most contracts will have a different client and design team members; it can seen be seen that team building and the dynamics of the group are important to ensure a successful conclusion to the project. Since construction projects are on average 12 to 24 month duration, rapid team building is essential. It would also be difficult to think of situations in the construction process where an individual could operate other than in a group scenario. The project manager relies heavily on the support and co-operation of those in the team and with the industry moving away from confrontational contracts and towards more partnership types, the team now embraces many more members. Some of these are based on site, where others are in the regional, head or design partner’s offices.

  Whilst the author has an affinity with the word ‘team’ as a concept commonly used in construction, many of the texts use the term ‘group’. To start with, group will be used to discuss the manner in which people can be organised, but in the latter part the emphasis is on how the group becomes a team and what constitutes an effective team.

  7.2 What is a group?

  A group is two or more individuals who have a common task objective, interact with each other, are aware of the others in the group and consider they are part of the group. There are two types of groups, namely formal and informal as shown in Figure 7.1 .

  The formal groups are defined as:

  •  Command groups.

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  Communicating in the 21st Century

  • Baden Eunson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  A coach can use exhortation to lift the morale of a sports team with a rallying speech, psyching the players up so that they will try just that much harder. A leader or manager of a work team can, under the right circumstances, obtain similar improvements in performance with the right kind of inspirational or visionary speech or conversation or memo.
• Finally, being within a team — sporting or working — where everyone is working together harmoniously, in unison, can be a very pleasant experience, and that experience is enhanced further when the team experiences synergy, or that state where the collective output jumps above the mere sum of the individual outputs.

Sports teams, work teams: the dissimilarities

There are, by contrast, many more dissimilarities than similarities when comparing sport teams to work teams.

• While goals are clear in sporting teams (sometimes they are literally goals), goals are not always clear in working teams, and indeed there may be multiple and contradictory goals within and between work teams.
• In sporting teams, it is quite difficult for an individual to have goals different from the team and to remain inside that team; in work teams, however, people’s actions and intentions are less transparent, and it is possible for a nonconforming individual to have separate goals and yet stay inside the team. This is not always a good thing, although it sometimes can be. Organisations are rarely unitary structures where everyone pulls together, laudable as that end might be. It is more realistic to see organisations as pluralistic coalitions of forces and empires, or as a double structure comprising the formal organisation on the one hand, which communicates through official channels, and the informal organisation on the other hand, which communicates through the grapevine. The goals of these sub organisations coincide sometimes — sometimes often, but rarely always.