The Importance Teamwork as an Element of The Society

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” This proverb by Henry Ford can very well highlight the importance teamwork. This essay disusses the ability to work in teams as one of the most vital soft skills that often taught in universities to be applied in the business world as well as required in professional life.

Loosely speaking, a team is a group of people with a different skills and knowledge, that is set up in order to achieve a common objective or goal. Nowadays, teamwork is an essential element of the society and plays an important role in assessing one’s ability in various kinds of career. Teamwork is not only reflected in a team’s success, but also in individual growth. According to Taylorist model, in current times there has been growing emphasis in tertiary education that students should develop professional skills as a part of their education. Skills such as problem solving, communication, collaboration, interpersonal skills, social skills and time management are actively being targeted by prospective employers as an essential requirement for employability, especially in a team environment. Of these, employment authorities consistently mention collaboration and teamwork as being a critical skill, essential in almost all working environments (Taylorist 2003).

Moreover, teamwork is the concept of people working together cooperatively, as in sales team, sports team etc. It has also become so valued that many large corporations have developed specific tests to measure potential employee’s teamwork ability. Hence, it has become an important goal in most workplaces, the belief is that teamwork gives employees a sense of ownership and encourages cooperation (Adeleke, 2008). Gardner and Korth (1998) asserted, “To remain innovative and competitive, businesses are looking for employees who can work and learn effectively in team”. Thus, understanding the impact of teamwork on performance is important because teamwork is viewed by some researchers as one of the key driving force for improving a firm’s performance (Jones et al, 2008).

There is evidence from psychology and management science that working in teams is more efficient than working alone. Therefore, it is not surprising that teamwork is becoming more and more popular. But teamwork is not just restricted to the workplace. Working in groups is also popular in classrooms all over the world.

This trend is especially visible in academia. Although the traditional vision emphasizes the figure of the solitary genius, like Newton or Einstein, in many aspects of contemporary science the number of researches done in teams dominates single-authored works not only in numbers but also in average citations.

Therefore, Teamwork can be very useful and important to organizations as they can complete critical tasks. Teams are also important and can perform at higher levels than typical workgroups. This higher performance level is the result of a greater synergy resulting from collaboration and jointly produced outputs rather than a pooling of individual outputs (Katz, 1997). The more informal environment within which team members work, and which also allows for communities of practice to develop resulting in on-going learning and creative applications, enhances the vitality of teams.

Works Cited

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