Essay on Improving the Performance Effectiveness of Groups

Team dynamics

Working in groups is inevitable especially if goals and objective are to be achieved. Team dynamics is essentially the process by which people in a group interact, share, exchange and contribute in a group towards a common goal (Hansen, R.S. 2006). Tuckman, Bruce W. (1965) postulated that there are five stages of group development including forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Team dynamics significantly affects the roles and responsibilities as well as productivity of each member. Through a group, much including challenges can be faced in unison, solutions can be tackled, a work plan can be formulated, and excellent results can be obtained can be achieved as opposed to individual effort. However, the shortcomings of being involved in a group are unsupportive members, lack of team synergy as well as weak leadership (Hansen, R.S. 2006). Through teamwork, I have come to know my leadership style and techniques.

Role played

As a team leader of the group, I was mandated to organize a team delegate section, decide on the topic to fit within the criteria of the subject area, prepare members for the presentation they were to make, encourage them to fathom the importance of performance in academic work and confidence building entailing future career. More often than not, I was motivated the group members to coordinate and cooperate in the work that we undertook collectively, and this helped me build my leadership and organization skills. However, I realized that most of the time I was impatient and that I lacked patience especially when the group members failed to perform tasks as mandated. Ideally, this taught me to understand people better and be in a position to handle and deal with people differently.

How to improve performance

To boost the performance of the group, I learned that there was a need to create an open forum and atmosphere where every member would feel part and parcel of the team. Creating an open-door policy in future would enable colleagues in the group to raise any problems, concerns, suggestions and questions (David M. Herold, 1978). Moreover, there is need to motivate the team members to take risks and make mistakes before others so that they can gain confidence to venture into new areas. In this case, I learned to listen carefully to the ideas of others, celebrate the success of others and motive them to strive for success in future.

References

David M. Herold. 1978. Improving the Performance Effectiveness of Groups through a Task-Contingent Selection of Intervention Strategies. The Academy of Management Review, 3(2), pp. 315-325

Hansen, R.S. 2006. Benefits and problems with student teams: Suggestions for improving team projects. Journal of Education for Business, September/October, 11-19.

Tuckman, Bruce W. 1965. Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399