Positive Psychology at Work:

Positive Team Working

1) Teams processes

Teams, and team working, are very popular in organizational development. Senge (1993) identified teams as the key unit where learning takes place in organizations. Many scholars and authors have noted the human desire to form social groups and how teams at work can fulfil this need, while others have extolled the productivity benefits that come from people bringing different skills and roles together in a coordinated way to achieve some purpose. Many organizations are built around the team as a core, recurring unit. At their best, teams produce synchronized, collaborative, enhanced output.

However, assembling some people and telling them to get on with something does not necessarily produce a team, even if they are called one and their manager is known as a team leader. Teams are groups that are inter-dependent, bound together by their reliance on each other. In 1995, Baumeister and Leavy identified that positive team relationships are more likely to arise when: people have frequent interactions with the same few people; those relationships are free from chronic interpersonal conflict; there is concern for the wellbeing of all members; and the team is stable and likely to continue to work together. We might note that this last condition is one that is increasingly under threat as workplaces continually reconfigure themselves to adapt to change. In their efforts to adapt, they may well increase the proportion of their workforce on temporary ...