Team Effectiveness Essay

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Defining and identifying team effectiveness is a complex task. Initially this task appears deceptively simple. Establish a measure of effectiveness and determine how different teams compare in regard to this measure. This approach however is confounded by the very notion of the study of team dynamics. Perhaps similar to the task of classifying a family to be functional or dysfunctional, only extreme behaviors in teams supersede the contextualizing influences of multiple levels of culture, time, location, and institutional environment. Cohen and Bailey’s review of the team effectiveness literature defines four types of teams that have different measures of effectiveness as reflected in the concerns of researchers and industry. Work teams are described as stable, well-defined and ongoing teams; parallel teams as limited teams that engage in generally consultative activities parallel to the organizational hierarchy, such as task forces and quality circles; project teams as time-limited cross functional teams that are organized around a project; and management teams as top executives responsible for the overall performance of a business unit. Effectiveness of work teams and parallel teams in the literature has been defined by objective measures of output quality and quantity, group member and manager perceptions, and behavioral outcomes such as job satisfaction and turnover. In contrast, measures of project team effectiveness rely almost solely on manager and supervisor perceptions and internal team perceptions. Effectiveness in management teams is based on firm performance. Differentiation of findings by team type is necessary in part because the teams and researchers have different objectives, but also in part because the selection of data represented makes it difficult to generalize findings across team types. 1 The majority of the research cited in this literature

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