Value of Teamwork

In today’s work environments, concept of personal achievement and thrive at any job that an individual may be in, is seems to be so important and crucial by management and employees, that caused more of a negative impact on work performance and of the individuals and even more on organizations. Where by the concept of teamwork seems to be faded to a large degree. In this paper the goal is to go detail into the true meaning of teamwork and how it affects the performance and productivity of the employees and organizations as a whole in a broader perspective.

Introduction

Let`s start with the word, Team. A word that, has a lot of different definitions and meanings to different people`s mind. But to be precise, Team could be described as group of individuals that work with each other to achieve a set goal and objectives for the consumers or organizations to deliver a high quality good and/or service.

Just knowing the definition of a team does not necessarily means that you can bring a bunch of individuals together, to work as a group to achieve a set goal whether for a simple set goal or in a larger scale for an organization. To create a team you have to first know, what the end goal is and what the necessary pieces are that needed in order to achieve it.

Team building exercises and activities, have a great impact to bring people you need together and give them a strong sense of understanding and better direction towards planned goals. Giving the employees a strong sense of belonging with the other employees and a clear strategy, customer focused values. A bad and a poor teambuilding exercise and planning activities cause confusion, decrease morale and discourage the individuals, teams and most importantly, the organization in which they work for, and at the end the failure of delivering the expected result will be what it causes. Everyone works hard, but usually on a wrong task and goals. Employees take baby steps towards accomplishing key action items and nothing important is often finished (Husain, 2011).

Team work is the capability and power of working together towards a same vision. It is fuel for people that allows them to achieve uncommon results. The existence of teamwork is a necessary rule to help the employees in working environment. The work performance of the team is bigger than each individual performance when the work is demanding a bigger much broader knowledge and opinion. The advantage of team work is huge productivity growth in a circle that needs creativity and problem solving of big problems (Vaskova, 2007).

The success of any organization small or big, local or global, private or government controlled, requires a positive force of teamwork, cause it helps the employees as one of the most important parts of any organization, to feel included, empowered and feel that the serve a purpose in a company’s towards achieving its goals. When have you ever felt or thought that you are doing something or have to do something that does not have an impact on anything and won’t be seen by anyone, feeling not appreciated for your knowledge, and for what you are doing. It seems that no one listens to you and there is no care about your opinion about the possible problems and issues that you encounter with every day. Well that’s why most companies growth and performance gets hit really bad, cause this is organizations responsibility to insure that the employee understand the importance of team work.

The concept of teamwork has always been an essential to any society or any organizations from the beginning of human civilization. Humans have been applying this concept throughout their revolutionary lives long time ago to solve various forms of struggle. To achieve the very simple and basic needs and requirement for a simple living, led them to use the concept to help each other. If you look at the centuries ago, some families, were to grow cotton, some coffee, some were hunters, and other were in lumber works. None of those people could live and survive on their own. That’s why they realize that trade was a good way of surviving trading their wood works with meet, or exchanging their wool and clothing for food or hardware.

This might not look relevant to the team work, but if you look deep, you realize that team work is having a group of people work together towards a common goal. In this case the goal is to survive and find a better more efficient way of living in those ages, and trading their goods with each other was a way of helping each other to achieve that set goal. This is the power of the team work. Teamwork is a culture. A culture that people have to attain in order to achieve their goal in anything. Without a team work a government struggles and collapse, companies out grown by the other companies they compete with and fail to deliver their good that were promised and at the end go bankrupted.

According to Wageman (1997) “”Company`s teamwork is the only way anything gets accomplished with quality and efficiency and a major reason why economic growth is under control and company`s success is scrutinized by top management to achieve the desired goals””.

One thing that most companies that are struggling at least in terms of their employee morale and not achieving their goals is that they treat their individual employees performance a head of the organizations performance as a whole. Teaching employees of their values and what they bring to the table, and showing them, each employee is a basic building block of their organizational foundation, will help them to overcome the greatest obstacle which is the employees morale.

By incorporating teamwork, in an organization working groups, regardless of their size and work scopes, helps them in developing the perspective and achieving skills of the working group members by exchanging a positive opinion, experience and feedback between the team and team members. And this creates continues development regarding of the organization service and employees` work performance and work ethic.

Imagine a senior project team, consist of 5 or 6 of your classmates. Which could have one or more in different majors from what you are studying in. a manufacturing engineering student, a mechanical, an electrical and a design engineering major student. All engineering degrees. All have an overall same concept and probably have knowledge about basic engineering principles. But with a different emphasis. The product that the team will be working on has different concepts imbedded in itself. Electrical parts, mechanical systems, and also has to have certain design.

Each team member will be able to contribute to the design of the final product by using their strength on certain parts. For sure a mechanical engineer has some knowledge in electrical systems or a manufacturing engineer knows some mechanical concepts but are they knowledgably to do all parts by themselves? The answer is yes they might, but how effective and is the final product come with the quality that was expected? Will the system works the way it is planned designed to? To do this you need people with different strength and knowledge about different engineering concepts.

This does not mean that the team will be successful by just gathering all these students and have them work together. You need to make sure that each individual has a task related and suited to his knowledge. There are times that the two different tasks with totally different concept cross path each other. An electrical system should be integrated into a section of the equipment that is planned to be built. Now this is the time that electrical concepts, design and mechanical come together and have to be able to work together in order to finish the task.

Here is when the role of the team leader comes into play. A leader has to make sure the team members have a good understanding of their roles and when they need to have to communicate with the other member, to be successful in the completion of their task. Having a high positive morale among the members of the team is crucial and workload is one of the most important parameters in having either a good high morale or a negative and low morale. There has to be an equal and even workload among all members of the team. and a leader is responsible for insuring all team members do their jobs and complete their tasks as they promised and committed to do it.

You have a student working on an electrical part of the design and here it comes the date that was stablished before and was meant to be tested with a mechanical parts but the part is not ready and there has been no communication between team members and team comes into an unfinished task and now project due dates are all mixed and will be late. Frustration increases among team members and members think that they are doing everything and one is not doing what he or she was assigned to do. Tension increases, morale goes down, team get discourage and if this continue to happens, team will fail to deliver the final product at the due date that was promised and goal won’t be achieved and in this case team members will fail to graduate by the time they were hopping to do so.

This was a simple example of a value of a team work and how impactful would be the lack of team work in a group as small as a senior project team, what will be the result of the failure. Now imagine this in a much larger group like an organization, or a government scenario.

Hence, organizations must increase and improve the idea of the teamwork among their workforces to raise the level of efficiency and creativeness in order to gain economic advantages and boost each employee`s performance as an individuals but still in a close relation with the team performance.

Now after having a real life example of value of teamwork and the effect of it on any team regardless of its size, it is fair to say that, the main value of the teamwork is to encourage the team members to work in a team and keep their morale high and give them the purpose of working together towards a common goal despite their differences and different opinions and rather using those opinions and ides and bringing them into the table to help achieve the goal faster and more efficient and make sure the workload is always equal and reducing it which helps the employees performance and help he or she to work without any pressure because the jobs and tasks were given unequally among team members.

And it is important to know that those organization which are not developing at all or at least fast enough, are lacking inadequate teamwork among their sections and different teams in each section of those organizations, where in result causes poor individual employee performances, they don`t finish their tasks and nothing gets done on time and properly, resources will be wasted due to lack of direction, guidance and employees work morale and ethic goes down drastically which in a broader perspective effects the organizations overall performance as a whole.

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