Management Style Can Be as Important as Management Competence

The Question.

1. “Groups are an essential part of the structure of an organisation but ‘teamworking’ is no more than a fashionable term used by management to give workers an exaggerated feeling of importance and empowerment.” (Mullins, 2007)

Introduction

The aim intended is to answer the question in stages set of first examining the key issues of a work groups, then comparing what it is perceived to be a team member teams and analysing key similarities of single lead work groups to teams to identify including groups in everyday life and teams and the links with human behaviour including aspects of team development which can be considered closely linked. While outlining teams and groups will therefore allow me to analyse the benefits and constraints of employee motivation and how it is critical to productivity.

By the end of the essay we will clearly be able to see what the modern world of management motivate staff with ideologies like teamwork team spirit and independence

I have based myself neutral on the question because productivity is the main concern regardless of how it is marketed to staff.

Main body    

  Understandably for employers attaining good working environment is key for maintaining optimum productivity, ideally improving staff morale between work groups or teams.

Groups and teams can be interchanged in-between it is at a particular organisation i.e. ‘boy bands’ are considered a group of singers were as, a football squad are referred to as a team. If the names were to be swapped over as an experiment in their respective fields of expertise then being called a group of football players could be viewed as lacking team spirit.

Frederick Herzberg's (1959) famous quote says "If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do." As organisations try to motivate staff in this day and age the autocratic leadership approach is soon becoming obsolete due to limitations of single leader work groups. Teams can be a lot more creative if each member has the potential to have multiple strengths and areas of expertise compared with work group with a single decision maker because ideas will be lost if an authoritarian manager is in charge and chooses not to take group members ideas on board. Which can therefore demoralise staff.

Hayes, (1997) noted that the idea of team must be one of the most widely used metaphors

In their examinations of the managerial practises used by the US Marine Corps to engage the hearts and minds of their frontline troops, Jon katzenbach and Jason santamaria (1999) contrasted the characteristics of a team with that of a single leader workgroup on a table which was reprinted by (Harvard Business review, exibit, p 114.)

Writers tend to focus on the transformation of a group into a team. They see the difference between the two as being in terms of a group being ‘stuck’ in the forming, storming or norming stage of Tuckerman and Jensen’s model, while a team is a group that has successfully arrived at the performing stage. From this point of view a team is a group which possesses extra, positive features. These positive traits include co-operation, co-ordination, cohesion, and so on. From this particular perspective, a group turns into team once it has organised itself to fulfil a purpose. This implies a process of conscious self management by the group’s members during which they assign tasks, develop communication channels and establish decision-making processes. Thus the transition from a group to a team is the result of a learning process.

The EPOC survey of European workplaces showed that some sort of teamwork existed in 36 per cent of European work places (benders and van hootegem, 2000)

This shows that in the modern world we are leaning towards team working to motivate and empower staff which clear is critical to turnover of effective productivity.

Marion Hampton (1999, p. 113) summarized the symbolic and practical aspects of groups:

Groups embody many important cultural values of western society:

Teamwork, co-operation, a collective that is greater than the sum of its parts, informality, egalatarianism and even the indispensability of the individual members groups can be seen as having a motivating, inspiring influence on the individual.

This draws the best out of them, allowing them to perform traits they wouldn’t if they had not been a part of the group. This could either show the companies as effectively manipulating staff or finding the correct balance.

Groups play an important role in our day to day lives. It has been estimated the average person belongs to five or six different groups. People can join groups because of common needs, interests or goals. Physical proximity or cultural similarity or assigned to groups by management. Much organisational work is preformed in teams as in McGraths (1984) circumflex model. The table shows the slight difference from the old autocratic boss in charge to the new dynamic teams which seem to be more motivated and more independent.

Group performance therefore affects the success of the organisation as a whole.

Being able to work productively with others is essential because more recently if you look at job applications companies place an emphasis on new recruits being good ‘team players’. That is a reason for the amount of development activities we have at most work environments e.g.

 When I started working for Aviva during our training there was a large amount of personal development activities as well as a clear agenda of teamwork being a big part of the organisation. Due to the fact we were being cross trained so we could work in any part of the building, in case emergency cover was ever needed.

 Hayes(1997p.1) noted ‘to an ever increasing extent, modern management has become focused on the idea of the team’ to an extent  this statement favours neither side of the argument because on one hand teams offer more creative freedom you have a higher understanding of the group you are working to help your team mates improving leaderships skills. On the other hand modern management has seen the benefit of empowering staff motivation clearly has its tangible benefits. Individuals can be motivated if they believe that there is a positive correlation between the efforts they put in and their performance and when that favourable performance leads to a reward. Consequently, the reward helps satisfy an important need and the desire to satisfy that need is strong enough to make the efforts worthwhile.

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