Our Theoretical Model
When first forming a team one does not consciously think about the theoretical perspectives that are in play. As Katie, Megan, and I first formed our team, we did not instantly open up our book and decide what theories would work best for us, we simply got to know one another, including our strengths, weaknesses, what we liked, what we did not like. As we continued to converse about our pasts, we realized that we all shared a background in sports. Each of us had played sports in the past, Megan and Katie had even been on a club volleyball team together almost five years ago in 8th grade. After reminiscing about our glory days we got down to business on the project. Looking back on that discussion, it becomes obvious that all of our successful teams shared at least some of the same characteristics.
As a team, we went through numerous theoretical models, but for some reason none of them seemed to fit what we were looking to show. It wasn’t until we looked back to our days in athletics that we realized some of the key elements that we were missing. As we revisited those teams we were on, it became obvious to each of us that we needed to have team member focus. Naturally, in team sports everyone has their own position, and role that they play. We thought to ourselves, that if it is good enough for athletics why not give it a shot with our own little three person team. Team member focus, and defined team roles became the basis for our theoretical model, and once we had some ground to stand on, we were off to the races.
Our model starts out with the team member focus concept that we got from The Science Behind the Smile article. We found that everything else that helped us succeed as a team stemmed from having good team member focus. Team member focus refers a team remaining focused on the task at hand, and their overall goal as well. According to the article “Mind-wandering on the job reduces both happiness and productivity. Managers may want to look for ways to help employees stay focused.” (smile article pg 88) We took this message to heart, and although none of us were the manager of the group we all made sure that the team stayed focused.
Staying focused is important to a team’s success, according to Daniel Gilbert “mind-wandering on the job reduces productivity.” (Gilbert, Pg. 89) It is obvious that Daniel Gilbert believes that mind-wandering can be detrimental to a team’s productivity, and in turn their success. In the beginning our team suffered from mind-wandering pretty badly, we would get off track, and as a result out project was going nowhere. That was until we read the article from Daniel Gilbert, who opened our eyes to the mistakes we were making by actively encouraging mind-wandering. In his article Gilbert presents factual evidence to support his claims that mind-wandering is detrimental to a team. “One major finding is that people’s minds wander nearly half the time, and this appears to lower their mood.” (Gilbert pg. 88) Happiness, according to Gilbert has a major impact on a team’s ability to perform. If a team consists of mostly unhappy members, then they will be less productive than a team made up of mostly happy members. After reading this article and seeing all the evidence to support the importance of focus, our team made the conscious decision to remain focused and tried to stay goal orientated.
Halfway through our project, we realized there is no simple cookie cutter model that will work for every team in every situation. That prompted us to look at our team in a whole new light, we stopped thinking of the project as what will work for everyone, and started to focus on what would work for us. We asked ourselves the hard questions. What do we struggle with? Where do we need someone else’s help? After tackling this thought provoking questions we were able to see that in our team’s case it was essential that we had three key roles. Those roles include harmonizer, initiator, and coordinator. We found that these roles matched each of our personalities, and this made each of us more excited about our specific role on our team.
In the article, What Makes High Performance Teams Excel? A team was formed of many workers from different companies to work on a new project. Each member was able to get a role in which they could feel committed to because it was something that they felt good about. Specifically, these engineers and project managers felt that,
“It was a simple exercise to merge the roadmap with the documented skills and interests so that:1) the best qualified individual
could be qualified individual could be matched with a given roadmap activity”… “This process enabled the diverse members to be
clustered as specialist sub-units on the basis on the basis of complementary skills, interests and unique expertise,” (42) Daniel.
This shows that the best groups result from members specializing in areas that they excel at. This article played a key role in our decision to specialize our own roles in our team. At this point in time we knew each other fairly well and the process of assigning roles went smoothly. We knew our strengths, we knew our weaknesses, and we knew what we had to do.
Megan had shown an inclination for solving problems that arouse in our team dynamic, and mitigating the debate Katie and David frequently had throughout the process. She fit the role of harmonizer perfectly, she kept everyone working together happily, and allowed all of us to flourish in our roles. Some other teams may not feel as if this role is a key concept that is needed for a successful team, but without Megan filling this role our team could have been a total disaster.
Megan followed the role of member personality as well, with her great personality alone it was impossible for David and Katie to have bad feelings towards the team or the project. After David and Katie not getting along in the beginning, it was easy to trust her when she said that we needed to focus on our project and not on who was going to be a leader. In a group, there does not always have to be a leader like there would be a coach or a captain on a team. Just because someone might come up with most of the ideas, many times those ideas are thought of due to other team member inputs.
The other role that our team needed filled in order to be as successful as possible was the role of initiator. This is where David stepped up to the plate, and as fate would have it he knocked it out of the park. The job of the initiator, also known as the contributor is to “propose new ideas”. (Colquitt pg. 367) As the initiator David had to use a bunch of Cognitive abilities. The main three abilities that he used in his role were originality, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning. Originality is the ability to “develop new ideas”, (Colquitt pg. 323) coming up with ideas in a group environment is key and the ability to be original is priceless. Deductive and inductive reasoning were valuable to David, he used both abilities to work out problems that arouse in his own ideas. A team needs someone to get the ball rolling, and David was that person for our group. He approached both Katie and Megan about forming a team, and without that act, the team would have never been, let alone be a successful one.
The last role that we felt our team needed in order to be successful was the all-important role of coordinator. Lucky for us Katie was born ready to be a coordinator. Katie’s ability to keep track of what the team was doing, was valuable to our success. Katie on numerous occasions arranged for when and where all of our members would meet. As much as everyone likes to talk about what happens when the team gets together, if nobody is responsible for making that happen, then nothing will actually happen. She was the one who made sure we all submitted what we needed to on time, and since this is a graded project success will be a reflection of the grade. If the team did not turn in the project there was no way they would get a good grade, and if the team does not get a good grade than it would not be successful.
In addition, Katie also make sure that our team structure would work well as we continued our project. Like the way that we created our team roles, team structure used similar ideas to make sure that we were working efficiently.
“Equally important was the creation of an operational team structure that would enable easy cross-functional inter-relationships. Cooperation and engagement as well as the open and flexible participation of the highly diverse team were recognized as vital to achieving congruent technological development and component integration across specialist team subgroups.” (Daniel 43).
Working with team structure will help every group member feel comfortable with what they are doing and they will be most willing to participate at their highest capacity. Having happy team members that need to communicate with each other will lead to a much more successful team.
Each of our roles in the team played a part in key concepts that make up a successful team. The role of the initiator plays into the concept of engagement through communication. As the initiator, David was always the one who got the ball rolling on conversations with his new ideas. A group needs to have a good communication system in place in order to share important information, which is a key to be successful. However, according to Pentlan, “Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.”(Pentland 65) This means, that although David’s role as the initiator was important in the engagement through communication concept, each member of the team was equally valued in the communication process. Another part that is important when engaging through communication is that “members connect directly with one another”. (Pentland pg. 65). We found that face to face interaction was a more effective way of relaying information then strictly through technology.
As we completed our project, we realized that every model would not fit every team. Every model would need to be individually crafted for each team and their desired outcome. For our particular team, we found that team member focus was good groundwork for the rest of our theoretical model. With all of us focused, we were each able to focus on a role that supported our specialized skills. These special skills made up three main concepts of a successful team. Those concepts were, engage through communication, member personality, and team structure. Without any one of the roles or concepts, our whole model would fall apart. They are interdependent on one another, and removing one of these aspects would greatly hinder our teams success.
When first forming a team one does not consciously think about the theoretical perspectives that are in play. As Katie, Megan, and I first formed our team, we did not instantly open up our book and decide what theories would work best for us, we simply got to know one another, including our strengths, weaknesses, what we liked, what we did not like. As we continued to converse about our pasts, we realized that we all shared a background in sports. Each of us had played sports in the past, Megan and Katie had even been on a club volleyball team together almost five years ago in 8th grade. After reminiscing about our glory days we got down to business on the project. Looking back on that discussion, it becomes obvious that all of our successful teams shared at least some of the same characteristics.
As a team, we went through numerous theoretical models, but for some reason none of them seemed to fit what we were looking to show. It wasn’t until we looked back to our days in athletics that we realized some of the key elements that we were missing. As we revisited those teams we were on, it became obvious to each of us that we needed to have team member focus. Naturally, in team sports everyone has their own position, and role that they play. We thought to ourselves, that if it is good enough for athletics why not give it a shot with our own little three person team. Team member focus, and defined team roles became the basis for our theoretical model, and once we had some ground to stand on, we were off to the races.
Our model starts out with the team member focus concept that we got from The Science Behind the Smile article. We found that everything else that helped us succeed as a team stemmed from having good team member focus. Team member focus refers a team remaining focused on the task at hand, and their overall goal as well. According to the article “Mind-wandering on the job reduces both happiness and productivity. Managers may want to look for ways to help employees stay focused.” (smile article pg 88) We took this message to heart, and although none of us were the manager of the group we all made sure that the team stayed focused.
Staying focused is important to a team’s success, according to Daniel Gilbert “mind-wandering on the job reduces productivity.” (Gilbert, Pg. 89) It is obvious that Daniel Gilbert believes that mind-wandering can be detrimental to a team’s productivity, and in turn their success. In the beginning our team suffered from mind-wandering pretty badly, we would get off track, and as a result out project was going nowhere. That was until we read the article from Daniel Gilbert, who opened our eyes to the mistakes we were making by actively encouraging mind-wandering. In his article Gilbert presents factual evidence to support his claims that mind-wandering is detrimental to a team. “One major finding is that people’s minds wander nearly half the time, and this appears to lower their mood.” (Gilbert pg. 88) Happiness, according to Gilbert has a major impact on a team’s ability to perform. If a team consists of mostly unhappy members, then they will be less productive than a team made up of mostly happy members. After reading this article and seeing all the evidence to support the importance of focus, our team made the conscious decision to remain focused and tried to stay goal orientated.
Halfway through our project, we realized there is no simple cookie cutter model that will work for every team in every situation. That prompted us to look at our team in a whole new light, we stopped thinking of the project as what will work for everyone, and started to focus on what would work for us. We asked ourselves the hard questions. What do we struggle with? Where do we need someone else’s help? After tackling this thought provoking questions we were able to see that in our team’s case it was essential that we had three key roles. Those roles include harmonizer, initiator, and coordinator. We found that these roles matched each of our personalities, and this made each of us more excited about our specific role on our team.
In the article, What Makes High Performance Teams Excel? A team was formed of many workers from different companies to work on a new project. Each member was able to get a role in which they could feel committed to because it was something that they felt good about. Specifically, these engineers and project managers felt that,
“It was a simple exercise to merge the roadmap with the documented skills and interests so that:1) the best qualified individual
could be qualified individual could be matched with a given roadmap activity”… “This process enabled the diverse members to be
clustered as specialist sub-units on the basis on the basis of complementary skills, interests and unique expertise,” (42) Daniel.
This shows that the best groups result from members specializing in areas that they excel at. This article played a key role in our decision to specialize our own roles in our team. At this point in time we knew each other fairly well and the process of assigning roles went smoothly. We knew our strengths, we knew our weaknesses, and we knew what we had to do.
Megan had shown an inclination for solving problems that arouse in our team dynamic, and mitigating the debate Katie and David frequently had throughout the process. She fit the role of harmonizer perfectly, she kept everyone working together happily, and allowed all of us to flourish in our roles. Some other teams may not feel as if this role is a key concept that is needed for a successful team, but without Megan filling this role our team could have been a total disaster.
Megan followed the role of member personality as well, with her great personality alone it was impossible for David and Katie to have bad feelings towards the team or the project. After David and Katie not getting along in the beginning, it was easy to trust her when she said that we needed to focus on our project and not on who was going to be a leader. In a group, there does not always have to be a leader like there would be a coach or a captain on a team. Just because someone might come up with most of the ideas, many times those ideas are thought of due to other team member inputs.
The other role that our team needed filled in order to be as successful as possible was the role of initiator. This is where David stepped up to the plate, and as fate would have it he knocked it out of the park. The job of the initiator, also known as the contributor is to “propose new ideas”. (Colquitt pg. 367) As the initiator David had to use a bunch of Cognitive abilities. The main three abilities that he used in his role were originality, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning. Originality is the ability to “develop new ideas”, (Colquitt pg. 323) coming up with ideas in a group environment is key and the ability to be original is priceless. Deductive and inductive reasoning were valuable to David, he used both abilities to work out problems that arouse in his own ideas. A team needs someone to get the ball rolling, and David was that person for our group. He approached both Katie and Megan about forming a team, and without that act, the team would have never been, let alone be a successful one.
The last role that we felt our team needed in order to be successful was the all-important role of coordinator. Lucky for us Katie was born ready to be a coordinator. Katie’s ability to keep track of what the team was doing, was valuable to our success. Katie on numerous occasions arranged for when and where all of our members would meet. As much as everyone likes to talk about what happens when the team gets together, if nobody is responsible for making that happen, then nothing will actually happen. She was the one who made sure we all submitted what we needed to on time, and since this is a graded project success will be a reflection of the grade. If the team did not turn in the project there was no way they would get a good grade, and if the team does not get a good grade than it would not be successful.
In addition, Katie also make sure that our team structure would work well as we continued our project. Like the way that we created our team roles, team structure used similar ideas to make sure that we were working efficiently.
“Equally important was the creation of an operational team structure that would enable easy cross-functional inter-relationships. Cooperation and engagement as well as the open and flexible participation of the highly diverse team were recognized as vital to achieving congruent technological development and component integration across specialist team subgroups.” (Daniel 43).
Working with team structure will help every group member feel comfortable with what they are doing and they will be most willing to participate at their highest capacity. Having happy team members that need to communicate with each other will lead to a much more successful team.
Each of our roles in the team played a part in key concepts that make up a successful team. The role of the initiator plays into the concept of engagement through communication. As the initiator, David was always the one who got the ball rolling on conversations with his new ideas. A group needs to have a good communication system in place in order to share important information, which is a key to be successful. However, according to Pentlan, “Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.”(Pentland 65) This means, that although David’s role as the initiator was important in the engagement through communication concept, each member of the team was equally valued in the communication process. Another part that is important when engaging through communication is that “members connect directly with one another”. (Pentland pg. 65). We found that face to face interaction was a more effective way of relaying information then strictly through technology.
As we completed our project, we realized that every model would not fit every team. Every model would need to be individually crafted for each team and their desired outcome. For our particular team, we found that team member focus was good groundwork for the rest of our theoretical model. With all of us focused, we were each able to focus on a role that supported our specialized skills. These special skills made up three main concepts of a successful team. Those concepts were, engage through communication, member personality, and team structure. Without any one of the roles or concepts, our whole model would fall apart. They are interdependent on one another, and removing one of these aspects would greatly hinder our teams success.
References |
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Colquitt, J.A. , Lepine, J.A., & Wesson, M. J. (2010). Organizational Behavior: Improving Performance and
Commitment in the Workplace, 2nd Ed. Burr Ridge, IL: McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Davis, R. (2009).What makes high-performance teams excel? Research-Technology Management, 52(4),
40-45.
Morse, G. (2012).The science behind the smile. Harvard Business Review, 90(1/2), 84-90.
Pentland,A. (2012).The New Science of Building Great Teams. Harvard Business Review, 90(4), 60-70.
Commitment in the Workplace, 2nd Ed. Burr Ridge, IL: McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Davis, R. (2009).What makes high-performance teams excel? Research-Technology Management, 52(4),
40-45.
Morse, G. (2012).The science behind the smile. Harvard Business Review, 90(1/2), 84-90.
Pentland,A. (2012).The New Science of Building Great Teams. Harvard Business Review, 90(4), 60-70.