Group and Teamwork

Introduction

In organizational behaviour, group is view as two or more individuals communicating together called ‘teamwork' to achieve the objectives of groups and organization. A team can be classified as two or more individuals who socially to accomplish organization relevant task (Steve W.J. Koslowski, 2006). Group can be either formal (form by organization’s structure) or informal (need for social contact).

Group Development Process

Forming is the first stage in group development process whereby group members will identify the group's purpose, structure, and leadership. Members are trying to identify what types of behavior and attitude are acceptable. The stage will fulfill when members start to assume themselves as part of the group.

Secondly, storming occur conflict over who will control the group. There will be an extremely clear view of leadership within the group when the conflict solved.

Next, norming is the third stage of group development which helps to build a strong sense of group identification and friendship. This stage will be complete when the group design solidifies and has assimilated a general set of expectations of what illustrate correct member behavior and attitude.

Apart from that, performing is the fourth stage in the group development process. At this stage group, strength or energy has moved from getting to know and understand each other to perform their job. In addition, this is the last stage of group development for permanent work groups.

Lastly, adjourning is the final stage for temporary groups for wrapping up activities rather than performance. At this stage, the group prepares for its dissolution after completing their objectives.

Group Decision Making

Effective and efficient decisions lead to achieving the group's goals. There are also some advantages to group decision making. Working in a group helps to generate more information, ideas, knowledge, and skills to increase the diversity of views. Also, groups lead to increased acceptance of a better solution as each of the members shared their experience exchange ideas and solution and alternatives to overcome issues.

However, there are also some weaknesses in group decision making. Firstly, group decisions are time-consuming. This is because each individual in the group have a different perspective of views and it is difficult to have consensus within the group members. Secondly, group decision can be dominated by one or a few members due to different abilities and skills of group members. As a result, groups must make a decision according to some different facets such as accuracy, speed, creativity, and acceptance.

Types Behaviour and Techniques in Group Decision Making

There are two types of behavior in group decision making. First is groupthink (related to norms) which means the situation in which group pressures for conformity deter the group from critically appraising unusual, minority and unpopular ideas. However, group shift is a change between a group's decision and an individual decision that a member within the group would make.

There are some group decision-making techniques that must be applied in teamwork such as interacting groups whereby members communicate with each other face-to-face. Next is brainstorming which is a process of idea generation and alternatives while withholding any criticism of those alternatives while nominal group technique is a method of group members meet face-to-face to pool their judgments in a systematic but independent fashion.

Types of Work Teams

A team involves different kinds of people and build a successful collaboration for achieving their goals. Sharing different opinions, knowledge, education, and skills among work teams help to make decision making (Sands, 2019).

Firstly, problem-solving teams consist of 5 to 12 employees from the same department who meet for a few hours each week to discuss the idea of improving quality, efficiency, and the work environment. Secondly, self-managed work teams consist of 10 to 15 members who take on the responsibilities of their former supervisors. The advantages of this team are to increase the productivity and quality of product and service and react fast to technologies changes. In contrast, the disadvantages of this team are the structural changes in job classifications and management levels eliminate the need for first-line supervisors and managers should learn to deal with teams rather than individuals. Thirdly, cross-functional teams mean employees from about the same hierarchical level but from different work areas who come together to achieve the task. Finally, virtual teams that use computer technology to tie together physically dispersed members in order to accomplish a general goal. Characteristic of virtual teams are the absence of paraverbal and nonverbal cues, a limited social context and the ability to overcome time and space constraints.

Team Performance Factors

Adequate resources mean scarcity of resources directly reduces the ability of the team to perform its job effectively. Moreover, leadership and structure show teams cannot function if they cannot agree on who is to do what and making sure all the members share the workload. Apart from that, the climate of trust despite effective members in a group trust each other and exhibit trust in their leaders. Lastly, performance evaluation and rewards illustrate management should modify the traditional, individually oriented evaluation and reward system to reflect team performance.

ARTICLE STUDY

In today's fast-paced evolution of workplace environment and culture, organizations in every company will have to take a step to change their workforce and organizations culture so that the organization will be able to be on par with today's globalized and competitive market. Today's workplace culture has shifted from individualist culture to collectivism culture which involves teamwork to achieve organization goals. It is well to be said that a single brain sometimes incapable of making an effective decision alone. Therefore, teamwork needs to be formed to support and guidance for others to come out with the best and effective solution to achieve a common goal of accomplishing significant task shortly.

At it simplest, there are some benefits of establishing teamwork in every organization which is teamwork helps to boost workforce production as the tasks are shared equally by members of a team and are allocated according to each team members strength and skills. An organization is said to have a competitive advantage when the company constantly promotes innovation. This is why working in teams promotes new ideas as each member’s share ideas and create innovative and practical solutions to problems together. Teamwork helps to improve communication skills. Working in teams require cooperation and understanding within each member especially when working in a diverse organization with people coming from different background and cultures. Teamwork also establishes strong relationships when they motivate and encourage each other to work with their knowledge, skills, and abilities. With this, it will develop trust and strong bonds that will help to create a positive work environment. Teamwork at the workplace has also increase creativity and innovation by allowing team members to bring up some unique ideas to boosts the performance of the organization. For instance, teamwork is more diverse in mind and dynamic and contain more unique skill sets that bring new opportunities and challenges in an organization to achieve the goals.

Based on the article above, there are teams where it involves permanent and temporary employees. Although teamwork is essential for participative work culture, managing teamwork of temporary employees is complex because permanent employees will have doubt feelings toward temporary employees readiness working in a team. This is because the temporary employees are less attached to the firms' clients and legal procedure practiced by an organization. This will affect the effectiveness of forming a team and eventually becomes a barrier to create a team-working environment for temporary employees. Besides, working with temporary employees create inflexibility towards other team members which are permanent employees. The contract of a temporary employee will affect the team to be less interdependent. Communication is also an issue as the temporary employees found themselves communicatively isolated from long-term employees in the team. If the management does not take further steps to correct these issues, it will leave the members integration unattended and conflict such as misunderstanding will occur.

From these issues stated in the article, there are several suggestions that can be solved. Firstly, the management should encourage the team members to communicate. Some temporary employees think that they are not eligible to voice out their opinion during brainstorming with the permanent team members. Management should teach temporary members some basic communication and problem-solving techniques to enhance their interaction skills and know their where-about. If conflicts between team members happen, it is advisable if the team members determine the real issue together. Sometimes, misunderstandings are caused by employees emotions. This is why it is advisable to slow things down and listen to each members problems. The management can also give some rewards to the team members. Rewards do not have to be financially rewarded but it can also be non-financial such as praise or motivation. The management should give some motivation to work as a team so that it will increase their morale and they will take things seriously as they work together to achieve one common goal. The management should have a small office party for the team members to know each other which will help them know each other's personality and backgrounds. This also would not let the temporary employees feel isolated when they team up with permanent employees.

Based on our opinion, teamwork in the organization of a company is actually a very important aspect of creating a well efficient to get project and tasks done in a timely-mannered to achieve goal settings. Therefore, teamwork needs to be formed to support and guidance for others to come out with the best and effective solution to achieve a common goal of accomplishing significant task shortly. Moreover, motivation and communication are two important elements which are a better solution in determining the success of the company. Conclusively, organizational behavior can create an environment having satisfaction moments of bonding together that can make each employee more interact that can help to maintain teamwork.

ISSUES RELATED TO GROUP AND WORK TEAMS

Based on the above introduction and factors, we knew that “differences between Group and Work Teams”; “Five stages of group development”; “Group decision making”; “Type of work Team”; “Team performance factors”; “Creating Effective Team” and “Team Process”. From those methodologies and theories which still have issues that become problems in apply to reality.

There are eight common problems from Harvard Business Review’s Answer Exchange lists as follow which is first, an absence of team identity. It means that members may not feel mutually accountable to one another for the team's objectives. There may be a lack of commitment and effort, the conflict between team goals and members' personal goals, or poor collaboration. For instance, one of the members has a different background with other members so that the person will show different logic or thanking compared with other members. When the personal goals conflict with team goals, that could become a problem.

Next is difficulty making decisions. Before that, this paper discussed the weaknesses of group decision making which shows ""Time Consuming""; ""Conformity pressures""; ""Dominance of a few members"" and ""Ambiguous responsibility"". In other words, we can say that team members may be rigidly adhering to their positions during decision making or making repeated arguments rather than introducing new information.

Thirdly is poor communication. That becomes a common and highest problem in the group and work team. In reality, the situation may show team members interrupt or talk over one another. There may be consistent silence from some members during meetings, allusions to problems but failed to formally address them, or false consensus like everyone nods in agreement without truly agreeing. But interesting is that we study lots of theories or methodologies and attend training for solving this problem, however, no one can say that he or she can hundred percent to avoid this problem because we are human beings. Due to that, to be a kind person is more important in the group and work team.

Fourthly, the inability to resolve conflicts. It means that conflicts cannot be resolved when there are heightened tensions and team members make personal attacks or aggressive gestures. Next is lack of participation which shows in team members fail to complete assignments. There may be poor attendance at team meetings or low energy during meetings. For this problem, the most common reason could be"" lack of motivation"" or ‘lack of skill"". Besides, the lack of creativity is also one of the problems. The team is unable to generate fresh ideas and perspectives and doesn't turn unexpected events into opportunities.

In addition, groupthink is one of the problems from the lists. According to Stephen P. Robbins said: ""Situations in which group pressures for conformity deter the group from critically appraising unusual, minority, or unpopular views."" In other words, the team is unwilling or unable to consider alternative ideas or approaches. There is a lack of critical thinking and debate over ideas. This often happens when the team overemphasizes team agreement and unity. Last but not least, the other problem is ineffective leadership. We can imagine that if a leader in the group but cannot lead group members, what happened on it? Which cannot run operations, due to that Leaders can fail teams by not defining a compelling vision for the team, not delegating, or not representing multiple constituencies.

IMPLICATION FOR MANAGERS

Managers should recognize that groups can dramatically affect individual behavior in organizations, to either positive or negative effect. Therefore, the manager should also pay special attention to roles, norms, and cohesion to understand how the group is likely to behave. Managers should pay attention to the status aspect of groups. This is because lower status people usually will never participate well in group discussions. When forming employee groups, they should use larger groups for fact-finding activities and smaller groups for action-taking tasks. However, measures of individual performance should be provided by managers when creating larger groups.

Every employee should receive their job based on their ability and capability or roles because this will increase employee satisfaction. The effective team expected to be small which is not more than 10 people. This will give freedom to the group members. Other than that, they also able to learn and use different kind of skills and talents to complete the task given. Individualistic organizations and societies attract and reward individual accomplishments, it can be difficult to create team players in these environments. To make the conversion, managers should try to select individuals who have the interpersonal skills to be effective team players, provide training to develop teamwork skills, and reward individuals for cooperative efforts.

The effective team has common characteristics which are adequate resources, effective leadership, a climate of trust, and performance evaluation and reward system that reflects team contribution. They have individuals with technical expertise as well as problem-solving, decision making and interpersonal skills, and right traits, especially conscientiousness and openness. Effective teams also have their members who trust and very confident about their team performance and committed to a common plan, have the same thinking and able to share specific team goals, maintain a manageable level of conflict, and show a minimal degree of social loafing.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, we can conclude that group and teamwork are actually important for every organization to achieve one common goal. This is because a form of group and teamwork enable to understand each other more related to their task given when they undergo some process and stages to form better teamwork. Forming of a group is an important aspect for performing many steps in the decision-making process which can open up the opportunity to consider more solutions and alternatives as well to complete the tasks. In some cases, we can see that groups can make better decisions than individuals.

However, even though there are some issues regarding the group and teamwork, we believe that there are some solutions to solve the issues related to group and teamwork. Solving the issues is the best way to create bonding among team members which means they can help each other regarding work to achieve an organization's goals. There are some solutions or implications for managers which is more significant for every manager to make sure teamwork have gone through a better phase in the group related to work. Last but not least, we believe that every group and teamwork can achieve more goals easily which can bring up a good reputation for every organization in a better future.

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