What is the importance of teams in business organizations?

The experts are almost unanimous on benefits of teams in the business organizations. Teams have become immensely popular in the organizations as these offer the following benefits:

1. Improved output due to Positive Synergy: Teams have the potential to create high levels of productivity due to positive synergy created by them. The output in the form of performance productivity is generally more than the summation of inputs put in the form of employee efforts. There is draw back of positive synergy also. Sometimes, managements resort to cuts in staff to use the positive synergy to get the same or greater output from fewer people.

2. Improved Organizational Communication: As the teams encourage interactions, it will lead to improved communication. In case of self managed teams, interpersonal dependencies are created which require the members to interact considerably more than when they work on jobs alone. Cross functional teams create inter-functional dependencies and increase organization wide communication.

3. Enhanced Employee Motivation: Work teams help in enhancing the employee motivation. Because work teams encourage employee involvement, these make the jobs more interesting and fulfill the social needs of the employees. Individuals are likely to perform better when they are working in the presence of other people. Individuals will work harder and put in a lot of extra efforts to remain in the team’s good graces.

4. Organizational Flexibility: Management has found that teams are more flexible and responsive to changing events than the traditional departments or other forms of permanent groupings. Teams have the capability to quickly assemble, deploy, refocus and disband. All this is because of the reason that teams focus on processes rather than functions. They encourage cross training so members can do each other jobs and expansion of skills. This expansion of skills increases organizational flexibility.

5. Satisfaction of Social Needs: Man is s social animal. He always feels the need of affiliation. Teams can satisfy this need of the employees by increasing worker interactions and creating a feeling of brotherhood and friendship among team members. Such employees are always in a better position to cope with stress and they enjoy their jobs more.

6. Commitment to Team Goals: Teams generally develop a common purpose, commitment to that purpose and agreement upon specific goals. All this combined with the social pressures exerted by the teams result in a high degree of commitment to common team goals. The individual members sublimate their individual goals for the common goals of the group.

7. Benefits of Expanded Job Training: The implementation of teams work always leads to expanded job training. Through this training employees build their technical, decision making and interpersonal skills.

Though the introduction of teams does not always achieve these benefits, but we can’t ignore the reality that team movement currently has tremendous momentum and reflects management’s belief that teams can be successful in a wide range of settings. These are obviously contingency factors that influence the acceptance and success of teams.