A Critique of the Discipline of Teams

Contents
1. Introduction............................................................................................1
2. Summary................................................................................................1
3. Critique...................................................................................................2
4.The main issues discussed in the journal article......................................3
5. Conclusion..............................................................................................4
reference.....................................................................................................4

1. Introduction

With the quick development of economy, more and more companies appear. Every company
faces specific performance challenges and teams may be the most dominant vehicle that
management can make use of. The managers have the important role to worry about the
companys performance and the kinds of teams to achieve it. Before making a better decision
about teams, the managers must have a good understanding of what a team is and how to make a
team work effectively. In some degree, this article is expected to analyze the issues that teams face
in order to give some advice to them.

2. Summary

A team is a small number of people having complementary skills, committed to a common

purpose, have a set of performance goals, and mutual accountability. Group is different from team
which has four elements, namely, common commitment and purpose, performance goals,
complementary skills, and mutual accountability. A team is not considered to be a group though
they have something in common. That is to say, they both contain many people who are working
together. The difference between teams and groups is their working results. A groups performance
result is only their individual result while a teams is including the groups performance and what
we call collective work product. A collective work product is the combined effort and real
devotion of all the team members. The group members do their own work as personal, but the

team members do their work as a whole. Thus, a teams performance result is more than the sum
of all individual parts. The basic element of a team is the common commitment. With it, a team
can exist, and without it, there is no team. In order to meet the demand and opportunity, the team
tries to put forward a purpose on their own. Then, they will change the specific purpose into
specific performance goal. However, any person has his special skill and nobody can get all skills
a team needs. Thus, the manager should know what skills will be needed in a team that can
achieve the performance goal that he wants, so that he can find out the people who have
complementary skills and make full use of them. Relying on their complementary skills, combined
with mutual accountability, the team succeeds.

3. Critique

The style of this journal article is objective and serious. There are many examples and dates to
show the views in the article, which makes the article reasonable and persuasive. For example, the
writer tells the stories how Bill Greenwood and a group of rebel railroaders opened a multi-million
dollar business and how the Medical Products Group at Hewlett-Packard was revitalized by a
number of people at HP to prove that real teams do perform and not just remain unstructured
groups. At first, the writer briefly states his reason for writing this article. Secondly, the writer puts
forward four elements which make teams function. Namely, common commitment and purpose,
performance goals, complementary skills and mutual accountability. By stating the four elements
significance, he also gives the differences between groups and teams, the normal size of teams and
the skills requirements of teams. What is more, the writer divides most of teams into three aspects:
teams that recommend things, teams that do things, and teams that run things. Each team faces
some issues and challenges.
I agree with what the writer said about the discipline of teams, but I still want to add something
else. First of all, as the reason for this article is to give suggestions about teams to top
management, it should not just focus on what a real team is. The article should also contain the
ways about how to build a reliable team. For example, when he says common commitment and
purpose, he should give suggestions in order for managers to get a better understanding of the
team members. Team members from different functional departments of the company interact in
every phase of development tasks to design the products and processes concurrently. To ensure a
successful multi-functional team, it is important to understand the characteristics of all team
members (Chen, S.-J, Lin, L, 2004). There is no doubt that a team may contain people from
different cities or even different countries. Put another way, those people may have totally
different cultures. For example, different from Chinese people, western people like
communicating in a direct way. It requires management to coordinate the communication of team
members. Besides, to have a common commitment means that the team members should trust
each other. In addition, given the fact that teams with higher level of trust perform better as
opposed to teams with lower trust (Gill, H, Boies, K, Finegan, J, McNally, J,2005). How to make
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team members trust each other is another question to management. Understanding the basic trust
built on, trust from others ability and quality assurance and the working process of the set. In my
opinion, a cooperative activity like trust buttock will work. It is said that a successful team could
create a purpose entirely on its own due to meet the demand or opportunity. As teams can predict
trends and provide proper solutions, companies must be able to gather the right people with the
right capabilities to be in teams so that performance can be sustained and renewed accordingly
(Neway, J,2013). This is the same as what the writer claims in this article -- a team must contain
complementary skills. A review of the extant literature (Senior, B, Swailes, S,2004) reveals that
the predictors of team performance can generally be categorized into (1) team task (task identify,
task interdependence, and task significance), team composition (team knowledge, team skills, and
team diversity) and team context (leadership behaviors and team support). Achieving high
performance is an aspiration to all teams. In managing teams, leaders and members need to be
sensitive to the surrounding context in which they work. These contextual variables include team
leaders leadership style and team members support (Azlyn Ahmad Zawawi, Aizzat Mohd
Nasurdin,2015). From these words, we can see how important the role management played.
Leader controls the whole operation of project and provides a suitable environment to team. Since
everything is developing all the time, the manager is expected to improve his ability and
encourage the team members to keep learning and reflecting. There is an old saying always ready
for rainy day. We cannot be perfect, but we can be better. If a leader always tries his best, his
fellow wont be worse.

4.The main issues discussed in the journal

article

Every team faces its own issues and challenges. The team recommending things has two issues
here: having a fast and productive start and dealing with the eventual hand-off thats required to
get recommendation implemented. The key to those two issues is the help from top management
because that both issues are related to management. If you want to enhance the teams efficiency
and reduce the time consumed to meet a goal at the same time, boosting the relationship between
the team and top management is the fastest way. Meanwhile, the team making or doing things
issue is how to build a system and process support without falling into the tap of appearing to
promote team for their own sake. To solve this issue, the management should link the team with
performance. If not, the contact between team and performance would be individual. This kind of
model is destined to be a failure. The team running things has two issues as well: determining if a
real team approach is the correct one and making sure the team succeeds in identifying specific
goals. A good beginning is half success and only a right direction can lead to where you want to
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go. In other words, a team wants to reach its goal, it must choose a right goal and right purpose. It
requires the team to have a good knowledge of market. Besides, the team can ask for help from
top management. Generally speaking, the top management has the right to determine what a team
does and how to do. But it does badly to teams enthusiasm. In order to improve the passion of a
team, the management should build a flexible environment and let the team suggest their own
purpose in order to meet the demand and challenge. Believe it or not, a person always cannot
reject the object created by himself. However, the decision combines the wisdom of management
and team members is expected to be a perfect decision.

5. Conclusion

A team can be a team because its members have a common commitment and purpose. Once they
have decided to do something, they get down to dealing with it. They all focus on the purpose and
trust each other. Of course that purpose is the result of their discussion. After making sure about
the purpose, they will translate it into specific performance goal. When the purpose and
performance go together and combined with all the members hardwork, the team will show its
magic power. However, the element deciding how far a team will go is complementary skill. As
we all know, every person is unique and has his own strengths. Finally, Id like to mention the
most important element -- mutual accountability that keeps a team growing. Mutual accountability
means mutual responsibility. Only involved in this way can the members of the team do their best
to achieve their performance goal. All above is what I learn about team from the article.

Reference
1. Azlyn Ahmad Zawawi, Aizzat Mohd Nasurdin. (2015) Innovation, Fiance, and the Economy:
Team context and team performance: An integrated review. Eurasian studies in business and
economies, volume 1, pp. 37-45
2. Chen, S.-J., Lin, L. (2004) Modeling team member characteristics for the formation of a multifun ctional team in concurrent engineering. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management 51:
pp. 111-124
3. Gill, H, Boies, K, Finegan, J, McNally, J (2005) Antecedents of trust: Establishing a boundary
condition for the relation between propensity to trust and intention to trust. Journal of Business
and Psychology 19: pp. 287-302
4. Neway, J (2013) Manufacturing culture. BioProcess International 11: pp. 18-23
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5. Senior, B, Swailes, S (2004) The dimensions of management team performance: A repertory

grid study. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management 53: pp. 317-333