Work Teams ch 11

Different tasks require different types of teams to accomplish them. You wouldn’t want a board of office CEO’s pouring the cement foundation for a skyscraper, in the same sense you wouldn’t want making a team of ground workers making executive business decisions. Eric Sundstorm developed a typology of work teams which consists of 4 groups; advice, production, project and action. Each type of team is used for a basic purpose. The advice teams are created in order to broaden the information base for the managerial decisions; they also tend to have a low degree in technical specialization. The production teams are normally in charge of coordination and day-to-day operations. The third teams, project teams, are required to have creative problem solving skills and often specialized knowledge. Our final team is the action team, the workers who get their hands dirty and actually get the job done. This requires a high level of skill in a certain trade and an extreme level of competence. I like to think of these teams like a professional sports program. Where the advice, production and project teams consist off the head coach, assistant coaches and managers where the actual players take on the action role and win games.
I did some research on team effectiveness and found a lot of comparisons to how a sports team is run. One of the essential keys to team success is that everyone accepts their roles, no matter how big or small. Everyone must do their job to the best of their ability and do it with enthusiasm. Also trust and communication is an enormous part of a team’s success. This applies to any type of team, whether is be a group of executives, a soccer team, or a successful marriage.

http://www.time-management-guide.com/team-building.html