My Experience of Working in a Team Environment

Teamwork is a quality that is encouraged in all aspects of life, be it social or professional. When practiced right, teamwork plays a crucial role in fulfilling a common goal more efficiently and effectively. Different team members contribute different perspectives, and the synergy between team members promotes creative and productive results. However, in different stages of teamwork, conflicts or arguments may occur as members have different standpoints which need be harmonized within the team. The key to effective teamwork is to exploit each team member’s unique abilities to motivate them, play up strengths, and avoid their weaknesses with a proper balance. Personally, I enjoy working in a team environment, and feel most efficient when paired in group. I believe I clearly recognize my role, learn to develop my strong points and circumvent weaknesses in the team.

For example, I had an experience where I worked with a large group on a class project in which we were randomly assigned to. Reflecting back on the teamwork experience, I realized that teamwork was not an easy task. In the evolve of team building, the Four Stages of Group Development can help better understand and manage unexpected circumstances or problems that might occur in different stages of team development. According to Griffin and Moorehead, there are four stages of team development: mutual acceptance, communication/decision making, motivation and productivity, and control/organization. During my experience from this group project, as we underwent the four stages of group development, both positive and negative circumstances occurred.

As mentioned, the initial stage of team development is mutual acceptance. In this stage, individuals are unfamiliar with one another which will be difficult to reach agreement. Each member is eager to find their place and sometimes have trouble finding a sense of belonging within the team. Consequently, in the early phase of my experience with my group one or two introverted members were not sharing their opinions with the group, a behavior known as Social Loafing. To overcome this obstacle in the first stage of development, I suggested breaking our large group into smaller “sub teams” for a brainstorming session: in other words I decreased our Group size. In these smaller sub teams, I suggested splitting the two introverted members and placing them according to where they felt most comfortable sharing. Evidently, the quieter members became more vocal and shared some insightful information. Ultimately, these ideas became part of our strategy and helped us successfully and collectively complete the project. This stage is important as it paves the for the next stages of team development. Each member’s strengths and weaknesses need to be identified beforehand in order to move on. This increases efficiency of teamwork which will do better to individual motivation and avoid less conflicts or complaints within the team. 

Works Cited

1. Griffin, R. W., & Moorehead, G. (2019). Organizational Behavior: Managing People and Organizations. Cengage Learning.
2. Hackman, J. R. (2012). Collaborative intelligence: Using teams to solve hard problems. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
3. Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (2015). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. Harvard Business Review Press.
4. Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399.
5. Lencioni, P. (2012). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. John Wiley & Sons.
6. Belbin, R. M. (1993). Team roles at work. Butterworth-Heinemann.
7. Hock, R. R. (1998). The art of creative leadership. Momentum Press.
8. Anderson, N., & West, M. A. (1998). Measuring climate for work group innovation: Development and validation of the team climate inventory. Journal of organizational behavior, 19(3), 235-258.
9. Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, F. P. (2009). Joining together: Group theory and group skills. Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.
10. Bales, R. F. (1950). Interaction process analysis: A method for the study of small groups. Addison-Wesley.