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Teams in Organizations

An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success. (Stephen R. Covey)

Key Learning Points

  • The six stages of introducing team-based working in organizations
  • Types of team communication styles in organizations and their effectiveness
  • What supports organizations should provide for teams
  • The role of the Human Resource Management department
  • Reward systems for teams
  • What role teams should play in organizations
  • A strategy for a team to change the organization
  • Inter-team relationships and how to improve them

In this chapter, we focus on how to build organizations that are structured around teams and can accommodate this diversity and creativity to ensure team and organizational effectiveness. We have worked in teams throughout most of our evolutionary history and are therefore well equipped to continue to do so effectively. However, in the last 200 or so years, the large work organization has become the norm and we have had to learn how to work in groups larger than 5, 6, 7 or 8 people – the norm for most of modern history. Now we are charged with working in teams in a larger organizational context, not just focused on the team’s work but also on its interrelationships with the larger organization. This is a major challenge because teamwork can be diluted to become a meaningless term applied to any structural grouping within ...

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