Team Dynamics

Team Dynamics

What are key considerations concerning team dynamics?

The term "group dynamics" describes the way in which people in a group interact with one another. When dynamics are positive, the group works well together. When dynamics are poor, the group's effectiveness is reduced.

Some key considerations concerning team dynamics include the roles the team members play, ensuring there are goals for the team and the team is progressing toward those goals, and ensuring management support for the project. Other considerations include the variation of experience levels on teams and the diversity of the team and that with diversity comes conflict. How that conflict is handled is the difference between poor team dynamics and positive team dynamics.

What are some key issues (in terms of interactions and relations) that team members may encounter?

In a situation that I was a part of as a manager of a group of IT analysts, one of the issues that affected the team dynamic was free riding. A newer member of the team decided to do the very minimum that he needed to do to get by and left the majority of the work for the rest of the team. He was not very thorough in his note-taking and recording of incidents and many times one of our senior analysts would have to follow up on his tickets to ensure the requests were completed. No matter how hard the rest of the team tried to encourage him and offer support, he continued his lackadaisical effort and attitude. This caused a great deal of stress within the team and disrupted the team cohesion.

As a member of a leadership team for another organization that I worked for, one of the team members had a habit of joking and using humor inappropriately which made many of the team members uncomfortable. This was a form of blocking, which would disrupt the flow of information to the group. Many of the team members weren’t sure if he was joking most of the time and didn’t know whether or not to take him seriously. It changed the dynamic of large group meetings because we always seemed to be waiting for him to interrupt with a joke or with inappropriate humor.

        Team members’ perceptions can also create a negative group dynamic. Again, when I managed the IT analyst group, we were the first line support for our employee’s IT needs. We had a second level support team that we could escalate issues to if we couldn’t resolve the issues. There was a perception from my team that they were looked down upon and that they weren’t able to solve what was considered to be easier problems because we didn’t have the right tools and hadn’t been trained properly. The team felt that they were seen as entry-level employees only and rarely offered recommendations for improvements because they didn’t think they would be taken seriously.