Summary Team Dynamics

© Copyright 2019. UpGrad Education Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved

In this session, you learnt about the following:

1. Organisational Teams 2. Team Building 3. Team Relationships 4. Power Management in Teams 5. Team Politics 6. Team Conflicts

In this segment, you learnt that a team is a group of individuals who comes together with a common purpose and goals. A group of people just working together need not necessarily form a team. Individuals in a team must have a common goal that they work towards collectively and generate positive energy in that process. You also learnt about the following five common types of organisational teams:

Summary

Team Dynamics

Organisational Teams


Each of them has a specific role to play and may form at any one phase of an organisation’s function.

1. Problem-Solving Teams: These are basically bonded by virtue of a common challenge that they want to solve as a team. It is possible that these teams are formed only when a problem arises and may get dissolved once the problem is solved.

2. Self-Managed Teams: These are essentially teams that take on the responsibility of managing the outcomes by themselves. That means there is an absence of a supervisor or a manager who is directing the goals as each individual feels responsible for the outcomes and for their own performance.

3. Cross-Functional Teams: A cross-functional team actually has people from the same

hierarchy but across different areas of work or departments.

4. Virtual Teams: These teams are dispersed across regions and collaborate online. Some companies have teams which are completely remote or virtual in nature.

5. Multi-Team Teams: Like the name suggests, when two or more teams come together to

perform a task, they are collectively termed as a multi-team team or a multi-team system.

In this segment, you learnt that there are nine types of roles in teams depending on the skills added by team members. Based on this, Dr Belbin has classified these nine roles into the following three groups:

• Action-Oriented Roles: Shaper, implementer and completer/finisher • People-Oriented Roles: Coordinator, team worker and resource investigator • Thought-Oriented Roles: Plant, monitor-evaluator and specialist

Through relevant examples, you learnt about these roles:

Team Building


ACTION-ORIENTED ROLES

PEOPLE-ORIENTED ROLES


THOUGHT-ORIENTED ROLES

Each role is crucial within the team and, hence, the composition of the team must be done carefully. However, this does not mean that a team must have nine members. This means, one person can assume multiple roles based on the requirements of the team.

In this segment, you learnt about the Johari window and how an individual can manage his and his team members behaviours through the knowledge of certain personality attributes. The Johari window can be explained through four areas or panes. These are:

Team Relationships


Power is a game of potential and perception. If your team members believe that you control the resources, you carry the potential to change attitudes and behaviour. At the same time, it is an asymmetric relationship tilted towards the person who has power, thus leading to a low level of trust in the relationship.

You learnt that French and Raven proposed different bases of power that exist at a workplace. These are:

Power in Teams


These different bases of power can be summarised as follows:

1. Reward Power: It is a power exercised by managers while rewarding their team members for

completing a task with excellence. An example could be of a reporting manager or CEO who decides to sign all bonuses.

2. Coercive Power: It is a type of power that is exercised when an individual can punish someone for non-compliance. For example, it could be a police officer, security guard, etc.

3. Legitimate Power: A form of power that comes with a belief that an individual has the right to take a particular decision by virtue of his/her hierarchical position in an organisation. Examples could be a line manager, CEO, CMO, etc.

4. Expert Power: An individual holds a position of power by virtue of his/her knowledge in a subject or matter of concern. Examples could be doctors, scientists, etc.

5. Referent Power: It is a type of power that is the result of a person's perceived attractiveness, worthiness, and right to others’ respect. Examples could be celebrities, influencers on social media, etc.

6. Informational Power: A form of power where an individual can control decisions basically by

sitting on a lot of information. An example could be of an individual in an organisation who handles confidential information will have a lot of informational power.


You also learnt about the soft tactics used at workplace to manage power. These are:

The hard tactics of power management can be summarised as:


In this segment, you learnt that political opportunism arises within teams at the workplace when an individual or a group of individuals take advantage of situations for self-serving purposes. You also learnt about the following three common conditions that might give rise to politics:

You also learnt about several ways in which a manager can avoid or reduce politics within an organisation or his team particularly. Some of these are as follows:

• Set clear rules for the allocation of resources • Promote organisational values and mission • Reward and train employees who display the right values • Ensure transparency in the processes • Keep the employees informed of organisational events and new

In this segment, you learnt the five reasons why conflicts arise in an organisation. They are as follows:

• Conflict due to personality: If the personalities of the two people or groups does not match, then this conflict arises

Team Politics

Team Conflicts


• Conflict due to goals: If a conflict arises when two people or groups are working on the same

thing but have different goals in mind

• Conflict due to process: It occurs when two or more groups have a conflict due to a difference

in the process, they wish to follow for completing a certain task

• Conflict due to status: It occurs when there is an argument or dispute over who gets the

credit for a task completed

• Conflict due to resources: Conflict due to resources occurs when there is an argument over

shared resources

Disclaimer: All content and material on the UpGrad website is copyrighted material, either belonging to UpGrad or its

bonafide contributors and is purely for the dissemination of education. You are permitted to access print and

download extracts from this site purely for your own education only and on the following basis:

● You can download this document from the website for self-use only.

● Any copies of this document, in part or full, saved to disc or to any other storage medium may only be used for

subsequent, self-viewing purposes or to print an individual extract or copy for non-commercial personal use

only.

● Any further dissemination, distribution, reproduction, copying of the content of the document herein or the

uploading thereof on other websites or use of content for any other commercial/unauthorized purposes in any

way which could infringe the intellectual property rights of UpGrad or its contributors, is strictly prohibited.

● No graphics, images or photographs from any accompanying text in this document will be used separately for

unauthorised purposes.

● No material in this document will be modified, adapted or altered in any way.

● No part of this document or UpGrad content may be reproduced or stored in any other web site or included in

any public or private electronic retrieval system or service without UpGrad’s prior written permission.

● Any rights not expressly granted in these terms are reserved.

Summary Team Dynamics

Documents