Aspects of a High Performance Team

A high performance team is very difficult to create. Every organization spends time, money and effort trying to create this strong work group. Once created, these teams will ensure quicker service in a short amount of time. There is no one perfect high performance team, each organization can have a different work group that can be their star team. The team's purpose is complete a specific task successfully and accurately. The beauty of a high performance team is that each person can have their strengths that will contribute to the entire team. The source of a high performance team is having a common goal, even with some demographic characteristics and cultural diversity a good high performance team can be built, and though conflict management can flourish.

The first step to building a high performance team is finding the right members. The Human Resource Department is in charge of finding those people. Human Resources (HR) starts with human resource strategic planning-the process of providing capable and motivated people to carry out the organization's mission and strategy. Key parts of this process are the staffing function, which involves the recruitment of employees-generating applicants; selection-making hiring decisions for each applicant; and socialization-orienting new hires to the organization (Chap 12). Recruitment for a high performance team is essential to the team's success. The process of attracting the best-qualified individuals to create the team is critical.

Each person in a high performance team has to have a personal power, so to speak, that they draw strength on. That personal power resides in the individual and is independent of that individual's position. Personal power is important in many well-managed firms. Three bases of personal power are expertise, rational persuasion, and reference (Chap12). Each team member should posses some of these qualities if not all. Expert power is the ability to control another's behavior because of the possession of knowledge, experience, or judgment that the other person does not have but needs. Rational persuasion is the ability to control another's behavior because, through the individual's efforts, the person accepts the desirability of an offered goal and a reasonable way of achieving it. Referent power is the ability to control another's behavior because of the individual's desire to identify with the power source(Chap 12). A high performance team member draws on this power to successfully complete tasks, which is why they are so desirable in the workplace. Power is the potential to control the behavior of others, and formal authority is the potential to exert such control through the legitimacy of a managerial position (Chap 12).

Along with power, a team member must be able to control conflict and remain clam with any given situation. Conflict occurs whenever disagreements exist in a social situation over issues of substance or whenever emotional antagonisms create frictions between individuals or groups (Chap 15). This includes being able to recognize situations that have the potential for conflict and to deal with these situations in ways that will best serve the needs of both the organization and the people involved (Chap 15). There are two types of conflicts substantive and emotional (Chap 15). Conflicts can happen for many reasons and can be both negative and positive. In high performance team conflict must be controlled and constructive. It can not lead to angry disagreement. The one encouraging aspect of having a high performance team is knowing that the members are united in the common goal; therefore they will work as a cohesive unit.

The process of dealing successfully with conflict begins with recognition of several types of conflict situations. Vertical conflict occurs between hierarchical levels. It commonly involves supervisor and a subordinate (Chap 15). If there happens to be a hierarchical with in the high performance team, there might be some conflict involved in that. Depending on the cultural diversity involved within each team, several situations