The term team-building can refer generally to the selection and motivation of teams, or more specifically to group self-assessment in the theory and practice of Organizational development (OD).
Generic team-building
"Team building" (or "teambuilding") can refer to the process of establishing specific groups to accomplish certain tasks in a sports club or some sort of organization. Ingredients seen as important to the successful set-up and launch of such team efforts include:
- selection
- establishing visions, goals, missions and/or objectives
- distribution of workload
- timetabling
- balancing skill-sets
- metrics
- harmonising personality types
- training on how to work together
The morale of the team, an important variable, may depend on such factors as:
- support
- resources
- communication
- personalities
As team performance reflects on management, managers -- and even coaches -- sometimes feel the need to take part in constructing and fostering teams.
As with many activities, team-building can run to extremes. For a notorious recent example of team building run amok, see the case of Kamp Staaldraad in 2003.
Team-building in Organizational development
Whenever a team in an OD context embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it engages in team building.
Assessing team effectiveness
To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:
- its current strengths as a team
- its current weaknesses
Improving team performance
To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:
- identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
- design any gap-closure strategy
See also
External links
Off-line reference material
- William G. Dyer, Team building: Current Issues and New Alternatives (3rd Edition). Pearson Education POD, 1995. ISBN 0201628821.
