TEAM WORK

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 433.

1. Introduction

1.1 Read the text title and hypothesize what the text is about. Write down your hypothesis.

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1.2 What do you know concerning this issue? List your ideas in the table left column “I know”.

1.3If you know answers to these questions write them down in the space given after each question.

1.4 Circle in the list the words and expressions you know. Write down their translation in the table and calculate the percentage of your lexical competence.

We spend much of our life in groups that exist for a purpose. We are born into groups (families), we are educated in groups (classes), we play in groups (sports clubs), we worship in groups (congregations) and we work in groups (companies). Many of these groups overlap or are divided into further sub-groups. Some groups, like school classes, meet daily while others, like the quarterly Health and Safety committee, convene less frequently. Some are formal groups established by company structure, such as departments, committees and project groups while others are informal social groups.

In project work tasks can be achieved more easily by teams with a common purpose, rather then by individuals. Of course, it's important to develop team work through team building so as to get the best from the team.

Dr Meredith Belbin has identified types of team members through his work in Henley Management College. He made a detailed observation of teams as they took part in a complex business simulation. He wanted to find out the best mix of people to make up an effective team. His work differs from previous studies in that it looks at the personality and disposition of the team members rather than their functional roles. Dr. Belbin carried out a serious of world-wide psychometric tests over 7 years period. The results of these tests led to the identification of the team roles. Of all those managers tested, only 30% failed to fall into single clear role categories.

Using a PERSONALITY Inventory Belbin began to manipulate team membership according to personality profiles. He found that poor results are obtained when the teams are made up of people with similar personalities. Belbin created ‘Apollo' teams made up from people of very high intellect. The ‘Apollo' teams performed badly because the group members tended to cancel out rather than complement each other. These people may have been brilliant as individuals in intellectual debate but when they come together as a team, their discussions did not lead to effective task performance. He suggests therefore that the ideal team needs a mixture of personality types and abilities.