Groups and Team Paper

Abstract

Groups are defined as a collection of two or more people who work with one another regularly to achieve common goals. Groups evolve into teams when the group works actively together to achieve a common purpose for which they hold themselves collectively accountable. In turn, high-performance teams are those teams that have strong core values, have specific performance objectives, have the right mix of technical, problem-solving, decision-making, interpersonal skills, and possess creativity. This paper will explain how a group can become a high-performance team. This paper will also include the impact of demographic characteristics and culture diversities on a high-performance team.

Introduction

Groups are important sources for performance, creativity, and enthusiasm for organization. Becoming a high-performance team not only takes a collective workforce among the members, but a good leader. An effective group achieves high-levels of task performance, member satisfaction, and team viability. In turn, high-performance teams are those teams that have strong core values, have specific performance objectives, have the right mix of technical, problem-solving, decision-making, interpersonal skills, and possess creativity.

High-Performance Teams

High-performance teams start with having the members that contain skills required to succeed. In addition, the leader creates clear and precise rules for the team. Managers set the expectations of team goals and the members of the team carry out this goal collectively. One the biggest difference of a group and a high-performance team is that a team will collectively take responsibility for the outcome of a goal.

Team cohesiveness is also important to the success of a high-performance team. Persons in a cohesive team value their membership and strive to maintain positive relationships with the other group members. Cohesive teams will have people who will less likely be absent and more likely to care about the team's successes and failures. In additions, cohesive teams have low turnover and satisfy a broad range of individual needs.

Team building also holds crucial success in the forming of a high-performance team. When teams are formed, they must overcome each other as well as continue the process of working together as a team. Team building allows the team to gather and analyze data on the team and to initiate changes designed to improve teamwork and increase group effectiveness.

Cultural Diversity

Teams have come under what is referred to as diversity-consensus dilemma. This is the tendency for increasing diversity among group members to make working with team members harder, even though that diversity itself expands the skills available for problem-solving.

When teams contain members that are similar in age, gender, race, experience, and culture; there are benefits