LE 04 - Valley Crossing - Key Learnings

"United we stand, Divided we fall" . The value of teamwork has been shown umpteen numbers of time in history. It has enabled man to come out of cages and reach the moon. What a single man cannot achieve individually can be easily achieved working as a team and that to with manifold increase in scale.

Explanation of valley crossing through this picture:

Learnings from this exercise:

Advantages and disadvantages of teamwork

Advantages

• ·         Teamwork can lead to better decisions, products, or services. The quality of teamwork may be measured by analyzing the following six components of collaboration among team members: communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort, and cohesion. In one study, teamwork quality as measured in this manner correlated with team performance in the areas of effectiveness (i.e., producing high quality work) and efficiency (i.e., meeting schedules and budgets). A 2008 meta-analysis also found a relationship between teamwork and team effectiveness.
• ·         Team members’ ratings of their satisfaction with a team is correlated with the level of teamwork processes present.
• ·         In healthcare, teamwork is associated with increased patient safety.

Disadvantages

• ·         Teamwork may have an "unintended effect of fermenting hostility toward the managerial goal of making the teams fully self-managing." In one case study of a clothing manufacturer, a switch from production line work (with bonuses given for individual performance) to teamwork (in which an individual's earnings depended on team performance) caused workers to resent having to monitor each other. 
• ·         There is a potential of "social loafing" (i.e., an individual's doing less work in a team than what he/she would normally do working individually). In order to minimize social loafing, management can make individual performance more visible while in a team setting. This can be done by forming smaller teams, specializing specific tasks to certain individuals, and measuring individual performance. Social loafing can also be reduced by increasing employee motivation, by selecting employees who have previously shown themselves to be motivated, and increasing job enrichment. In experiments conducted in the 1990s, an increase in group cohesiveness appeared to decrease social loafing.

These are some of the learnings from this exercise.