Team Building and Dealing with Conflict
Effective teamwork begins with the collaboration of a variety of people from different cultures. Each member has to be courteous to his or her teammates and respect the views of one another. All participants must be willing to share their ideas, but remain open-minded, while listening to others express their ideas and opinions even though they may be different from our own. An open-minded teammate can effectively criticize, critique, or expand through discussion of ideas or views that are presented.
The potential of a team depends on the skill, knowledge, and ability of the people in the team, but also on their ability and motivation to make the best use of their resources toward achieving the team purpose (Stevens & Campion, 1994). In order to achieve a given teams productive outcome, there has to be teammates that will raise questions regarding the teams direction. They must be willing to challenge and disagree with others, including the team leader, in a constructive manor avoiding major conflicts.
An important factor to building a team is selecting a team leader because the leader will help the team to success. A team leader must be someone who is open-minded, reliable, and mature enough to handle any situation that may come up in a group. A team leader is a motivator and is very important to the whole team. An effective leader will utilize teammanship to identify their position on various teams and seek out the sources of power to influence each team (Yukl 1989).
There are two distinct phases to teammanship. The first phase involves the creation of the group and the second phase involves the transformation of this group into an effect ...