Mgt 567 - Notes from Chapter 1 to Chapter 6

CHAPTER 1: Teams in Organizations: Facts and Myths

WHAT IS A TEAM?

1 A group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources, and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal

2 Five key defining characteristics (Exhibit 1-1)

1 Exist to achieve a shared goal

2 Members are interdependent regarding some common goal

3 Are bounded and remain relatively stable over time

4 Members have the authority to manage their own work and internal processes

5 Operate in a larger social system context

3 A working group consists of people who learn from one another and share ideas, but are not interdependent in an important fashion and are not working toward a shared goal

WHY SHOULD ORGANIZATIONS HAVE TEAMS?

1 Teams and teamwork are not a novel concept

2 Teams can be more effective than traditional hierarchical structure for making decisions quickly and efficiently

3 Four challenges of the future that point to importance of teams

1 Customer service focus

2 Competition

3 Information age

4 Globalization

TYPES OF TEAMS IN ORGANIZATIONS (EXHIBIT 1-2)

1 Manager-led teams (the manager acts as the team leader and is responsible for defining the goals, methods, and functioning of the team)

2 Self-managing or self-regulating teams (a manager or leader determines the overall purpose or goal of the team, but the team is at liberty to manage the methods by which to achieve that goal)

3 Self-directing or self-designing teams (determine their own objectives and the methods by which to achieve them; management has responsibility only for the team’s organizational context)

4 Self-governing teams (usually responsible for executing a task, managing their own performance processes, designing the group, and designing the organizational context) Teams in Organizations

SOME OBSERVATIONS ABOUT TEAMS AND TEAMWORK

1 Teams are not...