Team Development

There are perhaps four traditional approaches to team building:

• Setting Goals: This emphasizes the importance of clear objectives and individual and team goals. Team members become involved in action planning to identify ways to define success and failure and achieve goals. This is intended to strengthen motivation and foster a sense of ownership. By identifying specific outcomes and tests of incremental success, teams can measure their progress. Many organizations negotiate a team charter with the team and (union leaders)
• Role clarification: This emphasizes improving team members' understanding of their own and others' respective roles and duties. This is intended to reduce ambiguity and foster understanding of the importance of structure by activities aimed at defining and adjusting roles. It emphasizes the members' interdependence and the value of having each member focus on their own role in the team's success.
• Problem solving: This emphasizes identifying major problems that block the productivity of the team and attempting to solve them with alternative solutions.
• Interpersonal-relations: This emphasizes increasing teamwork skills such as giving and receiving support, communication and sharing. Teams with fewer interpersonal conflicts generally function more effectively than others. A facilitator guides the conversations to develop mutual trust and open communication between team members.

Of these, Goal setting and role clarification tend to have the greatest impact because they enhance motivation, reduce conflict and help to set individual purposes, goals and motivation.