TEAMNET: New Dimension of Team Building and Management

Social Facilitation

The term social facilitation can be defined as an improved performance caused by seeing and/or hearing other people do the same activity. Therefore, imitation, competitiveness and social prestige are involved. Facilitation can be seen in less difficult or automatic tasks. In more difficult tasks, facilitation needs to be replaced by synergy.

Synergy

The effectiveness and success of individual’s work depend not only on individual actions (management functions, assigned tasks, activities, success factors, company components) but also on a harmonic integration of these elements into a whole, which is called the synergic effect (holism, the principle of integrity, emergence).

Holism as a whole is more than a sum of its parts. It is an intangible and incognizable integrity agent. To divide the whole into individual parts would mean that the effect ceases to exist. Structuralism sees a set of phenomena of a certain section as logically structured integrity. The distinctive quality of a system is determined not only by the qualities of its individual parts but also by their co-existence in a particular environment which creates its emergent qualities. Emergence can only be seen in a functional unit, as a result of an action of integration ties of system individual elements. Synergy means that a whole is more than a sum of its parts, as the relations between the individual parts are also an important part of it. In this connection, it is necessary to point out that the traditional analysis based on the division of the whole into its individual parts is in conflict with this principle. The traditional analysis, based on Descartes’ principle of dividing the whole into individual parts, does not allow for an effective analysis of the conditions in a group. As a result, a different approach needs to be used to examine the synergic effect. The synergic effect is present in the following:

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  Teamwork;

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  Integrated management (merge information and substantive-energetic parts into one whole);

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  Process management (integration of internal processes in a company based on pre-projection);

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  Learning organization – Peter M. Senge (1990) defines it as “an organization where people are constantly developing their ability to achieve required results, where expansive ways of thinking and collective aspirations are encouraged, and where people learn how to learn together.” The company learns not only from its own mistakes but also from their more successful competitors;

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  The goal is to create an environment and mutual relations that would result in a whole bigger than the sum of its individual parts. That is the nature of synergy. The synergic effect can exist without mutual influence.