Team Building

Building a Better Team

Introduction:

When groups are created in any organization there is bound to be conflict. The reason for this is because people come to any given situation with their own individual ideas, visions, values, and goals. A team has been defined as “a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” (Kinicki, 2009, p.261) due to having a group of individuals that demonstrate different views, values, and or ideas; conflict is bound to happen. Team building has been created for many reasons; the main reason is for conflict resolution. In this paper I will describe a team building exercise to solve conflict in the workplace and explain how to facilitate and get an understanding of the team building exercise.

Team Building Exercise

Team building exercises build trust, relationships, and respect so that each member of the team are armed with a variety of conflict resolution strategies to help deal with each conflict that arises in the workforce. Conflict is not inherently bad. In fact, conflict simply stems from differing viewpoints. Since no two people view the world exactly the same way, disagreement is quite normal. In fact, anyone who agrees with you all of the time is probably telling you what you want to hear, not what they actually believe. The reason conflict is perceived to be bad is because of the emotional aspects that come along with it. When there is conflict, it means that there is strong disagreement between two or more individuals. The conflict is usually in relation to interests or ideas that are personally meaningful to either one or both of the parties involved. The key to managing conflict effectively is to learn the skills necessary to become a good conflict manager. A great way to manage conflict is to put team building exercises into the workplace. The main purpose of team building is to teach...