Team Building

The term team-building can refer generally to the selection and motivation of teams, or more specifically to group self-assessment in the theory and practice of Organizational development (OD).

Generic team-building

"Team building" (or "teambuilding") can refer to the process of establishing specific groups to accomplish certain tasks in a sports club or some sort of organization. Ingredients seen as important to the successful set-up and launch of such team efforts include:
  • selection
  • establishing visions, goals, missions and/or objectives
  • distribution of workload
  • timetabling
  • balancing skill-sets
  • metrics
  • harmonising personality types
  • training on how to work together
The morale of the team, an important variable, may depend on such factors as:
  • support
  • resources
  • communication
  • personalities
As team performance reflects on management, managers -- and even coaches -- sometimes feel the need to take part in constructing and fostering teams. As with many activities, team-building can run to extremes. For a notorious recent example of team building run amok, see the case of Kamp Staaldraad in 2003.

Team-building in Organizational development

Whenever a team in an OD context embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it engages in team building.

Assessing team effectiveness

To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:
  • its current strengths as a team
  • its current weaknesses

Improving team performance

To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:
  • identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
  • design any gap-closure strategy

See also

External links

Off-line reference material

  • William G. Dyer, Team building: Current Issues and New Alternatives (3rd Edition). Pearson Education POD, 1995. ISBN 0201628821.

 

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