Teamwork In Research

How will your readings on Teamwork influence your thinking on how to improve the working of the various teams within the Hotel ?

An African proverb says : « If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together. » It is one of the different ways to define teamwork. That means, group works boost the research and the result because of the number of brains. A team is a group of persons who create an unity and reliability which are strengths. People in a group have to help others to make the team successful by reaching effectively te goals set.These goals connect team members together. There are many theories developped to improve teamwork. However, all this process is more than related to the team members but also, to perform the

A group is composed of more than 1 person who interact together to achieve a target established by the manager. In a group each person has his/her assigned role. Two kind of group exist : formal and informal. The formal group is jamming by an organisation because of the complementarity of team members. To help the organisation to form the group with some complementarities, personnality tests were created to maximise the productivity to reach goals. Belbin’s Theory of team roles was created to give to the interviewe an idea of where are his/her strength, for that Belbin use nine segmentations (Plants, Shaper, Monitor Evaluator, Team Worker…). The second one is more related to the personality of team members. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator helps the team to understand each other much better. Now, the informal group is done by friendship, it is social group. When a group is developping itself it is dynamic. Group changes in 4 different steps and this is Tuckman’s theory. As you can see in graphic under the first step is forming, here each team members have to know each others during this process, members are positiv and happy. The second step is storming where the group is in conflict and where the productivity is lower. Then, norming step is when the group find its identity and the group structure is solid. Last but not least the performing

Little groups (less than 10) are faster of course they do not make some much time to know each other (Forming, Storming-Mintzberg steps). Due to a study, large group are more effective to resolve problem efficiently.

To make a group effective, leader and team members have to interact to be productive and as in a rugby tournament each player is crucial to a successfull achievement of goals. C. Edmondson found that expertise is a critical characteristic of effective team performance. In this context, we can say that one of the key functions of the corporate learning environment must be to support the development of individual expertise in order to create the conditions for effective and cohesion.
Other characteristics of effective teams include:
• having a strong team identity and a shared knowledge that enables members to plan, anticipate, and execute
• having members that compensate by stepping outside of their assigned roles in order to help the team; and
• achieving situation awareness by diverging and converging, which is the process of actively seeking a variety of views from team members
• converging the views into a coherent