FACTOID #129: The five countries with the highest coffee consumption are also the five countries whose citizens trust one another the most. Coincidence? Probably.
In Organizational development, whenever a team embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it engages in team building.
To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:
its current strengths as a team
its current weaknesses
Improving team performance
To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:
identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
design any gap closure strategy
For further reading
William G. Dyer, Team building: Current Issues and New Alternatives (3rd Edition). Pearson Education POD, 1995. ISBN 0201628821.
Sometimes the term "team building" (or "teambuilding") refers to the process of establishing specific groups to accomplish certain tasks in an organization. Among the ingredients that are critical to the successful set-up and launch of such team efforts are:
goals and objectives
timetables
metrics
training on how to work together
The morale of the team is an important variable and is often affected by such factors as:
support
resources
communication
personalities
As teamperformance reflects on management, managers should take part in constructing and fostering teams.
As with any activity, team building can be taken to extremes. For a notorious recent example of team building run amok, see Kamp Staaldraad.
The Nasa Exercise: Lost on the Moon (http://nasa.perbang.dk) - On-line version of a widely used team building exercise for measuring team processes.
Developing Teamwork (http://www.developingteamwork.com/cm.pl?cid=wp_team_building) - A video based learning package designed for organisations wishing to improve the effective use of the intellectual resource of their people. Available for review online free of charge.
Teams that are stuck in conflict and mistrust use teambuilding to surface, address, resolve and use conflict positively, as an asset.
Teambuilding provides groups of all kinds with the strategies and skills to practice and improve as a team.
While teambuilding has tremendous potential to improve group communications and performance, many teambuilding activities fail or fall far short of their potential to achieve lasting results.
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