Groups and Teams
It has proven to be very hard to define the difference between groups and teams in recent studies. Some ways in which often differentiates the two are things like the size of the team/group, if the team is of large numbers i.e. over 6 it is mostly seen as a group – less than this and it’s a team. Another way to tell is by how it is led. If there is specifically one leader then it tends to be a group and a team tends to have a shared leadership role. Also you can define the two by how it is selected then it would be a group but a team has to be very specific on who its members are.
There are several different types of teams described by Katzenbach and Smith. The theories they came up with were that some teams are temporary and some are permanent. Some teams have a lot of different people with different skills so that they can do a wide range of tasks and some teams have specifically skilled people to do specific jobs and nothing else.
Once teams are formed each individual member tends to gain a role in the team according to Belbin who describes nine different roles,
- Co-coordinator
- Shaper
- Plant
- Resource investigator
- Implementer
- Team worker
- Completer
- Monitor evaluator
- Specialist
When a new team is formed it goes through many different stages. Tuckman produced the most well known theory on these stages in 1965. He found that there were four main stages that a team goes through as they develop. These were Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.
Forming:- This is the stage when the team are first brought together. This is when they begin to try and work out their duties and their place in the team.
At this point the leader should be considering how the team are feeling in their new environment and should be sympathetic. Although he should still maintain almost an autocratic style of leadership as the team need to be told what to do and when to do it for.
