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.

The importance of team functioning has been highlighted by a number of writers and some of the characteristics of effective teams have been highlighted by them are: The atmosphere in teams is generally relaxed, informal and comfortable. All the members of the team understand and accept the task assigned to the team. All the members of the team listen to each other and a lot of discussion related with the task is done in the team. The team members can freely express their feeling their ideas and though there are conflicts disagreements among the members of the teams but these are only about the ideas and methods related with the completion of the task and not focused around the personalities and members of the team. Generally the decisions the team are based on consensus and once the action have been decided upon, clear assignment are given to the members of the team. When all these characteristics are present in a team, it means the teams is capable of successfully achieving its objectives and at the same time, satisfy the personal and inter-personal needs of its members. Thus the following characteristics are found in effective teams. These are a clear purpose, informality, participation, listening, civilized disagreement, consensus in decision making, clear roles and assignment, share leadership, open communication and self assessment.

Teams have emerged as the most important group phenomenon in the organization. Earlier the importance of the team work was confined to sports activities but now in business also team work as become very important. In the past business organizations were focused around individuals but now teams have become the primary means for achieving the organizational goals. Some times the terms team and group are used interchangeably but they are not the same. While a work group consist of a number of a person that report to common superior and have face to face interaction and there is a certain level of inter-dependence in carrying out the tasks but they performance of a team can provide individuals results and collective products also. We can say that though a team is also a group but it has some characteristics in greater degree as compare to ordinary groups. These characteristics include a higher commitment towards the goals of the group and a higher degree of inter-dependence and interaction. These characteristics make a team different from an ordinary group. There are some difference between work groups and teams. While the basic purpose of a work group is to interact for the purpose of sharing information, the basic purpose of work team is to perform collectively. While the work group must have a strong and clear focused leader, teams generally do not have clear leaders and the leadership roles are also shared. The work group meets through the formal and efficient meetings the teams are encouraged to have open ended active problems solving meetings. The functioning of the work group that it discusses decides and delegates the work, the functioning of the team is to discuss beside and then do the real work also.

They can be some problems in the implementation of job enrichment in the organizations. It is also possible that job enrichment may not lead to the desired results. The limitations of job enrichment are:

1. The first basic problem is that majority of workers do not want the type of changes which are introduced by job enrichment. They do not really want challenging jobs, as the basic human tendency is to shirk responsibility. Workers put wages and job security above all.

2. Job enrichment is basically limited to the unskilled and semiskilled jobs. Jobs of highly skilled professionals already contain many challenging elements. As such there is no scope of applying job enrichment in their cases.

3. Technology may not permit the enrichment of all the jobs. With specialized machinery, tasks and processes, it may not be possible to make the jobs very meaningful.

4. Job enrichment is a highly costly affair. In most of the cases, the cost involved is more than the gains in productivity.

5. Sometimes, the employees may prefer to have job enrichment but may not have the necessary capabilities and qualifications to meet the new challenges.

6. In the short run, job enrichment may have negative effects. After an increase in job responsibility, it is not unusual for organization to experience a drop in productivity, as workers become accustomed to the new system. In the long run, however, there will be increased productivity.

7. People being bored in their jobs, it is likely, therefore, that after a period of time they will become bored in their enriched jobs also. Thus, enrichment may become static after some time and additional enrichment will be required.

8. There is, generally, a tendency on the part of the management to impose job enrichment on workers rather than applying it with their consent; it will have a negative impact on the employees.

9. The top managers and personnel, generally apply, their own scale of values of challenge and accomplishment to other people’s personalities this evokes more resistance from workers.

Despite these limitations job enrichment remains an effective technique for motivation which gives proper recognition to the complex human and situational variables.

Job enrichment is a useful technique for motivating the employees. It is also beneficial for the organization because it provides increased output and also a high level of satisfaction among the workers. The benefits of job enrichment are

(i) In the routine jobs, the employees find their jobs very boring and monotonous. The number of such employees is generally considerable. The frustration of these employees can be removed by making the job interesting with the job enrichment.

(ii) Job enrichment helps in reducing the races of employee’s turnover and absenteeism.

(iii) Job enrichment motivates the employees intrinsically by giving them opportunities for growth advancement and self realization.

(iv.) Task enforcement is made easy with the help of job enrichment and the skills of workers are increased.

(v) The enriched jobs give more job satisfaction to the employees.

(vi.) Job enrichment is advantageous to the organization as there is qualitative as well as quantitative improvement in output and there is higher satisfaction of the workers.

(vii) Employees tend to be more creative when they work in an enriching context of complex and challenging jobs.