2 - Team Development: Refers to a wide range of activities, usually in a business context, for improving team

performance. It generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development, but can also be
applied to sports teams, school groups, and other contexts. Team building is not to be confused with "team
recreation" that consists of activities for teams that are strictly recreational. Teambuilding is an important factor in
any environment, its focus is to specialize in bringing out the best in a team to ensure self development, positive
communication, leadership skills and the ability to work closely together as a team to problem solve. Work
environments tend to focus on individuals and personal goals, with reward & recognition singling out the
achievements of individual employees. "How to create effective teams is a challenge in every organization."

Methods for Team Building

• Simple social activities - to encourage team members to spend time together
• Group bonding sessions - company sponsored fun activities to get to know team members (sometimes
  intending also to inspire creativity)
• Personal development activities - individual programs given to groups (sometimes physically challenging)
• Team development activities - group-dynamic games designed to help individuals discover how they
  approach a problem, how the team works together, and discover better methods
• Psychological analysis of team roles, and training in how to work better together (And combinations of
  the above)

Team interaction involves "soft" interpersonal skills including communication, negotiation, leadership, and
motivation - in contrast to technical skills directly involved with the job at hand. Depending on the type of team
building, the novel tasks can encourage or specifically teach interpersonal team skills to increase performance.

Models of Team Behavior

Team building generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development. The related field of team
management refers to techniques, processes and tools for organizing and coordinating a team towards a common
goal - as well as the inhibitors to teamwork and ways to remove, mitigate or overcome them. Several well-known
approaches to team management have come out of academic work.

• The forming-storming-norming-performing model posits four stages of new team development to
  reach high performance. Some team activities are designed to speed up (or improve) this process in the
  safe team development environment.
• Belbin Team Types: can be assessed to gain insight into an individual's natural behavioral tendencies in a
  team context, and can be used to create and develop better functioning teams. The Belbin Team Role
  Inventory assesses how an individual behaves in a team environment. It is therefore a behavioral tool, subject
  to change, and not a psychometric instrument. The assessment includes 360-degree feedback from observers
  as well as the individual's own evaluation of their behavior, and contrasts how they see their behavior versus
  how their colleagues do. Unlike the Myers-Briggs, which is conventionally used to sort people into one of 16
  types by how clearly they express their preference for 4 dichotomous types of behavior, the Belbin Inventory
  scores people on how strongly they express traits from 9 different Team Roles?

  An individual may and often does exhibit strong tendencies towards multiple Roles. Belbin himself asserts
  that Team Roles are not equivalent to personality types.

  The Roles
• Plant: Plants are creative, unorthodox and a generator of ideas. If an innovative solution to a problem is needed,
  a Plant is a good person to ask. A good plant will be bright and free-thinking. Plants can tend to ignore incidentals
  and refrain from getting bogged down in detail. The Plant bears a strong resemblance to the popular caricature
  of the absent-minded professor/inventor, and often has a hard time communicating ideas to others.
• Resource Investigator: The Resource Investigator gives a team a rush of enthusiasm at the start of the project
  by vigorously pursuing contacts and opportunities. He or she is focused outside the team, and has a finger firmly
  on the pulse of the outside world. Where a Plant creates new ideas, a Resource Investigator will quite happily
  steal them from other companies or people. A good Resource Investigator is a maker of possibilities and an
  excellent networker, but has a tendency to lose momentum towards the end of a project and to forget small details.
• Coordinator: A Coordinator often becomes the default chairperson of a team, stepping back to see the big
  picture. Coordinators are confident, stable and mature and because they recognize abilities in others, they are very
  good at delegating tasks to the right person for the job. The Coordinator clarifies decisions, helping everyone else
  focus on their tasks. Coordinators are sometimes perceived to be manipulative, and will tend to delegate all work,
  leaving nothing but the delegating for them to do.
• Shaper: The shaper is a task-focused leader who abounds in nervous energy, who has a high motivation to achieve
  and for whom winning is the name of the game. The shaper is committed to achieving ends and will 'shape' others
  into achieving the aims of the team. He or she will challenge, argue or disagree and will display aggression in the
  pursuit of goal achievement. Two or three shapers in a group, according to Belbin, can lead to conflict, aggravation
  and in-fighting.
• Monitor Evaluator: Monitor Evaluators are fair and logical observers and judges of what is going on. Because
  they are good at detaching themselves from bias, they are often the ones to see all available options with the greatest
  clarity. They take everything into account, and by moving slowly and analytically, will almost always come to the right
  decision. However, they can become very critical, damping enthusiasm for anything without logical grounds, and they
  have a hard time inspiring themselves or others to be passionate about their work.
• Team-worker: A Team-worker is the greasy oil between the cogs that keeps the machine that is the team running.
  They are good listeners and diplomats, talented at smoothing over conflicts and helping parties understand each other
  without becoming confrontational. The beneficial effect of a Team-worker is often not noticed until they are absent,
  when the team begins to argue, and small but important things cease to happen. Because of an unwillingness to take
  sides, a Team-worker may not be able to take decisive action when it is needed.
• Implementer: The Implementer takes what the other roles have suggested or asked, and turns their ideas into
  positive action. They are efficient and self-disciplined, and can always be relied on to deliver on time. They are
  motivated by their loyalty to the team or company, which means that they will often take on jobs everyone else,
  avoids or dislikes. However, they may be seen as closed-minded and inflexible since they will often have difficulty
  deviating from their own well-thought-out plans.
• Completer Finisher: The Completer Finisher is a perfectionist and will often go the extra mile to make sure
  everything is "just right," and the things he or she delivers can be trusted to have been double-checked and then
  checked again. The Completer Finisher has a strong inward sense of the need for accuracy, rarely needing any
  encouragement from others because that individual's own high standards are what he or she tries to live up to.
  They may frustrate their teammates by worrying excessively about minor details and refusing to delegate tasks
  that they do not trust anyone else to perform.
• Specialist: Specialists are passionate about learning in their own particular field. As a result, they will have the
  greatest depth of knowledge, and enjoy imparting it to others. They are constantly improving their wisdom. If
  there is anything they do not know the answer to, they will happily go and find it. Specialists bring a high level
  of concentration, ability, and skill in their discipline to the team, but can only contribute on that narrow front and
  will tend to be uninterested in anything which lies outside its narrow confines.

Organizational Development

In the organizational development context, a team may embark on a process of self-assessment to gauge its effectiveness
and improve its performance. To assess itself, a team seeks feedback from group members to find out both its current
strengths and weakness.

To improve its current performance, feedback from the team assessment can be used to identify gaps between the
desired state and the current state, and to design a gap-closure strategy. Team development can be the greater term
containing this assessment and improvement actions, or as a component of organizational development.

Performance Standard for Team Genesis

Performance is a measure of the results achieved. Performance efficiency is the ratio between effort expended
and results achieved. The difference between current performance and the theoretical performance limit is
the performance improvement zone.

Another way to think of performance improvement is to see it as improvement in four potential areas.

First, is the resource INPUT requirements (e.g., reduced working capital, material, replacement/reorder time,
and set-up requirements).

Second, is the THROUGH-PUT requirements, often viewed as process efficiency; this is measured in terms
of time, waste, and resource utilization.

Third, OUTPUT requirements, often viewed from a cost/price, quality, functionality perspective.

Fourth, OUTCOME requirements, did it end up making a difference.

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