Hidden Benefits of Keeping a Team Intact

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In any environment team work is important and team chemistry can greatly affect the results. According to the article “The Hidden Benefits of Keeping a Team Intact,” one of the authors met an orthopedic surgeon who performs knee replacement surgeries in 20 minutes. Other doctors perform the same surgery in one to two hours on average, and have more complications. The surgeon does use the same brand of prosthetic knee to improve efficiency, but the biggest reason is his team. Most all surgeon’s teams are constantly changing, but this surgeon has two teams. By using the same two groups of people every day, they create good team chemistry and are able to perform the job smoothly. Keeping a team intact works good in other areas also. A Professor from Harvard researched airplane crews and found that over seventy percent of airplane accidents happen when a crew is flying together for the first time. The military also keeps teams intact, such as navy seals and other special ops teams to increase familiarity amongst the team. Another research found that professional basketball teams play better when they have been together for a while, however when together to long they make more mistakes. The mistakes made by a basketball team could be cause by the other team predicting their game plan. The authors studied one thousand and four projects with over eleven thousand workers on those projects. “We found that when familiarity increased by 50%, defects decreased by 19%, and deviations from budget decreased by 30%” (Huckman and Staats, 2013). The study also showed that team familiarity was more reliable predictor than individual experience of each member on the team. They also tried mixing up the teams by putting a bigger range of experience on the teams, which made it more difficult. However, the teams with more familiarity still performed better, while the other teams
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