Teamwork
Organizations are involved in cooperation. Cooperation skills are among the most respected accomplishments attempted by employers. In the 1990s, there was a revival of interest in cooperation, and the benefit has been increasing since. Knowledge, communication, technology, and the way that it has enabled changes in the world of a business causes this revival in involvement in the prevalence of teamwork in a business. An environment that utilized teamwork went dormant in the 1970s and the 1980s. This revival in professional involvement in teams facilitated by changes in technology and the world of business too renewed interest in teams and cooperation by academics. These rewards and disadvantages of teams are easily demonstrated.
Teamwork skills are vital to business decision-making. Some advantages of working in a team include the ability to collaborate with others and the opportunity to learn from each other, to develop new ideas and skills, to be more creative and innovative, and have a sense of community. When you are collaborating with other employees, you are essentially combining everyone’s backgrounds and strengths to discuss multiple outcomes. However, some disadvantages come along with being part of a team. First, it is difficult to find people who share your interests and values. Some might put in a significant amount of work because they care about the result while others show signs of the free-rider problem. Second, it can be hard to make decisions about how to best support your group. When there is no one leader, everyone can believe that their opinion is the best and the optimal outcome may not be achieved. And third, it can be very difficult to get everyone on the same page when you have different opinions about what’s important to you. This is why we need a strong team structure for an organization. To achieve our goal, people need to be assigned roles within the group.
I have been in groups that were effective because they all had a clear goal and agreed to follow through with it. One example of this was when I was working as a research intern and I was assigned a group. We had one group supervisor and we had to break up the research between the interns. The goal was to learn about the relationship between the US, Greece, and China on various subjects. Since there were 3 countries that we were studying, we each focused on one country and then would have weekly meetings to compare and contrast information. We utilized the spreadsheet method so that we were always able to see what the other person found and hopefully answer our questions. Every couple of weeks we would write our information in paragraphs according to the subject so that our supervisor would have something to read and look over. Then we would consider his comments and fix anything that he believed should be changed. Being able to question what our supervisor would say and talk about it in a respectable manner was an important aspect of teamwork within the organization.
Teamwork skills are vital to business decision-making. Some advantages of working in a team include the ability to collaborate with others and the opportunity to learn from each other, to develop new ideas and skills, to be more creative and innovative, and have a sense of community. When you are collaborating with other employees, you are essentially combining everyone’s backgrounds and strengths to discuss multiple outcomes. However, some disadvantages come along with being part of a team. First, it is difficult to find people who share your interests and values. Some might put in a significant amount of work because they care about the result while others show signs of the free-rider problem. Second, it can be hard to make decisions about how to best support your group. When there is no one leader, everyone can believe that their opinion is the best and the optimal outcome may not be achieved. And third, it can be very difficult to get everyone on the same page when you have different opinions about what’s important to you. This is why we need a strong team structure for an organization. To achieve our goal, people need to be assigned roles within the group.
I have been in groups that were effective because they all had a clear goal and agreed to follow through with it. One example of this was when I was working as a research intern and I was assigned a group. We had one group supervisor and we had to break up the research between the interns. The goal was to learn about the relationship between the US, Greece, and China on various subjects. Since there were 3 countries that we were studying, we each focused on one country and then would have weekly meetings to compare and contrast information. We utilized the spreadsheet method so that we were always able to see what the other person found and hopefully answer our questions. Every couple of weeks we would write our information in paragraphs according to the subject so that our supervisor would have something to read and look over. Then we would consider his comments and fix anything that he believed should be changed. Being able to question what our supervisor would say and talk about it in a respectable manner was an important aspect of teamwork within the organization.
What is the basis of what you wrote in the first paragraph? And was it focusing on the U.S. only are was it supposed to apply to organizations globally. There was a book by an award winning journalist, David Halberstam, called The Reckoning that compared the Japanese company Nissan Motors to the American company Ford Motors. At the time it seemed the Japanese car companies were running circles around their American counterparts. Halberstam's thesis was that the Japanese companies were run by engineers and contemporary product design was their focus. In contrast American companies were run by MBAs, and the balance sheet was their focus. Customers preferred the first approach, wanting more fuel efficiency in the cars they purchased. The point for mentioning this example, is that this isn't so much about cooperation and teamwork as it is about emphasis and orientation of the companies. A more recent example is Apple under Steve Jobs. He was not known as a great collaborator, but he did have a reputation as having an eye for the next generation product.
ReplyDeleteIn this post, you wrote generally about the issues in the first two paragraphs and then got down to your experience in the third paragraph. You talked some about the process of your group, which is fine. You said you were assigned to this group. Do you know how that worked and on what basis your assignment was made? Likewise, what about the interns in the group? You said the goal was to learn about the relationship Greece had with the U.S. and China. After such learning happened, do you know to what use that learning was applied?
I know from some other things we have communicated that Greece is struggling now and is experiencing an outflow of younger working people. Was the research you did ultimately aimed at stopping that flow and perhaps reversing it? Then you might consider, especially if the other interns were also undergraduates, why the work was done by professional economists and/or by doctoral students. Would having done that increased the impact of the work? Alternatively, would it have cost much more to do the necessary research?
As I've written on many other of these posts, but of your post needs to provide sufficient context for the reader (me in this case) to understand what you are saying. If you took the approach you did take because you needed to get over the bar regarding the minimum word requirement for the post, do note that providing the context would also help you do that. And it would have improved this piece.
During the course of my internship, I was working with another undergraduate student and our supervisor worked for the IIER for over 15 years. The main reason we worked together was because we were the only two students from America. After we collected the data we created a draft of a paper where our supervisor edited and used in conferences. It focused just on reading articles and articulating/ cross referencing them. I research did not really focus on the citizens, more-so how the US and China influenced Greece. Since most of the students there were unpaid interns, the institute would produce better final drafts if the interns were post-grad students.
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