Before we find out how teams fail,
let see why teams are put together in the first place. The University of
Washington University defines Teams as "a group of people with different
skills and different tasks, who collaborate on a joint project, service, or
goal, with a meshing of functions and mutual support"
(courses.washington.edu, n.d). Each member of a team is unique and brings
his/her functionality and uniqueness to the team. Also, the success of the team
evaluated using performance evaluation processes. It is ideal to state that a firm's
reason to create a team is to maximize the collective effort of the team since
each brings his/her uniqueness to bare. For instance, if it takes an employee
two hours to build a bicycle, it might take four employees 30 minutes to finish
the same work. By forming a team to carry out t the task, the productivity of
the team can increase. In such cases, the employees are compensated as a team
on piece rate basis (Brickely, J., Smith, C., Zimmerman, J., 2016). Adam Smith
also realized the effect of division labor when he visited a Pin making factory
(Smith, A, 1776). By having employees work as a team, apart from boosting
morale within employees, it fosters unity and in the long-run reduces employee
turnover.
Teams frequently are used at all
levels of the organization. Teams are formed because they are more successful
at assembling specialized knowledge for decision making than are alternative
methods that might be used to pass the knowledge through the traditional
hierarchy (Brickley, J., et., al., 2016).
Since we know why teams are formed,
and how strategically important teams are to the long-run return on investment
for shareholders. Firms tend to invest in making sure teams succeed by
mitigating factors that could cause a team to fail. One of the reasons teams
fail is due to lack of trust within the team. Since there is a likelihood of
conflict of interest or dysfunctionality sometimes due to different
functionality and specialty that each team members may possess, agreeing on a
common ground might be difficult. Also, it might be hard for team members to
trust another team member's competency especially when they have never been on
the same team (forbes.com, 2015).
Lack of Planning can also account
for why teams fail. Without foresight and a "clearly defined goal
understood by every team member, there will be a disparity in how each member
believes that goal should be reached"(Capsim, 2015). There is a positive
correlation between proper planning and the success of a team. “Many teams are
expected to arrive at a goal without receiving the proper prior training and
support, making it a doomed venture from the get-go"(Capsim, 2015). Teams
also fail due to lack of good leadership. A good team leader can foster unity
and coherency among team members. A good team lead can harness the strength of
a team to maximum efficiency. A good team lead is also able to reduce
free-riding through proper monitoring of the team activities to ensure every
team member is doing his/her quota of the task.
Finally, Peer pressure is another reason teams
fail (Brickley, J., et. al., 2016). Sometimes team members tend to emulate or
copy bad behavior or ethics from peers which might be detrimental to the
long-run success of the team. One reason is that "individual team member
experience the need for approval from other members, which is supported by the
common human desire for acceptance"(brighthubpm.com, n. d). Although peer
pressure can be positive, a negative peer pressure can lead to an unproductive
or under produce team which in the long-run can result in the dissolution of
the team without meeting its goal.
