Abstract
Teamwork is a preferred way of working in today's working life. Teambuilding helps both individuals and teams identify their strengths, weaknesses, and thereby, opportunities and challenges. This chapter presents some central findings on efficient teams and teambuilding and gives suggestions on a few useful tools to help build high-performing teams. Building trust within a team is paramount. Understanding one's own contribution and the value of others, different contributions are also important. A suggested way of setting up a teambuilding workshop for students is outlined. Furthermore, this chapter highlights the advantages of putting effort into teambuilding activities at the beginning of a project.
TopBackground
Teambuilding can be achieved in many ways. In some companies, it has traditionally meant going away to a remote place to eat, drink and relax – in Finland to enjoy a sauna – and just be together. This is a good start, but so much more can be achieved. Today in many organizations, human resource managers are encouraging, and often also facilitating, activities with the purpose of building a basis for efficient teamwork. What then are the main prerequisites for efficient teams? A few suggestions have been given. One traditional suggestion is to look at the individuals, find the best experts in their fields, and put together a team of top performers. This is rather common in sports. Sometimes this method is successful, but often less so. Another approach based on the individuals is to try to find out how well the personalities involved in a team seem to fit together. For mapping personalities, there are personality indicators such as Big5 (openpsychometrics.org, 2019), Myers-Briggs (The Myers-Briggs Company, 2021), and many more. Team role indicators, such as Belbin’s team role indicator or team-role descriptions such as de Bono’s thinking hats, are also widely used. In a large study undertaken by the Google corporation, they found out that these things do matter, but that there were other things even more important for creating top-performing teams (Duhigg, 2016). From the teambuilding point of view, there is one overarching concept that describes the goals with such activities, that is, shared mental models. Mental models are organized knowledge structures that allow people to predict and explain the behavior of people and the world around them (Mathieu et al., 2000). In multicultural teams, this is a challenge. The mental models differ at the start. The faster the mental models become known, understood, aligned and shared, the sooner a team can perform. The types of mental models that can be influenced in teambuilding are models of work, teams and teamwork. To put it simply, when team members learn to know each other’s understanding of these issues, they become more predictable to each other. When a team puts effort into creating a team contract, they find out their differences in their mental models about working together in a team. Still, they can also start finding common grounds for team interaction. It helps them to identify potential challenges and strengths in the team.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Teamwork: The activity of working together in a group with other people, especially when this is successful.
Personality: The unique combination of qualities in a person that makes that person different, as shown, systematically, by the way the person feels, thinks, and behaves.
Team Role Theory: A theory about the different roles played by members of teams that suggests that individuals with a particular personality are most comfortable in a specific role.
Team: A group of people who act together to achieve a shared goal.
Teambuilding: The process of encouraging group members to work well together and the activities that help a group work together more effectively as a team. It is commonly used as a two-word noun, i.e., team building, and as a hyphenated word when referring to team-building activities, exercises, and skills. The authors found it more appropriate to use a single word when teambuilding is the focus.
High Performing Team: A group of goal-focused individuals with specialized expertise and complementary skills who collaborate, innovate, and produce consistently superior results.
Mental Models: Organized knowledge structures that allow people to predict and explain the behavior of people and the world around them.