Is Team Work in-Born or Learned?

Jacob Waiswa
Peace and Conflict Center
P.O. Box 7062,
Makerere University
Kampala-Uganda
jwaiswa@arts.mak.ac.ug

Team work involves sharing information, tasks and strategies towards attainment of individuals, group organizational, national or international agenda.

In spite of the benefits resulting from teamwork, there greater inclination to individual-based approaches to completing work and an element of perceived convenience in handling tasks allocated more to them than to teams.

Teamwork option remains a challenging option, much as a lot of effort has been exerted on it as a basis of working procedure in most if not all of the work stations.

Team work is understood as means to ease problem-solving efforts, to promote innovation, and to fasten production process. Perceived convenience to individual level tasks is attributed to introverted personality types, who feel at best working alone compared to their counterparts –the extroverted ones.

Forcing the two different sets of personalities to fit into another person’s line of work is itself a source of strain. A good decision made is one that pairs individuals according to personality preferences rather than forced pairing or grouping.

Group forming or team work building is easier for people who have been seeing each other around for considerable long period of time or that like one another rather than mingling them with strangers.

For strangers it will definitely take time: firstly, they will experience mistrust and suspicion; secondly, forming biases and positions within the team; thirdly, greater conflict and compelled acceptance of each person’s values and behaviors; fourthly, cooperation for the sake of fulfilling team or organization objectives.

Before two years babies will tend to limit much of their interaction with their mothers while after that, they begin to socialize with the environment. However, occurrence of social interactions will have to do with the question of how in secure or insecure the baby was during his or her early development years.

The insecure ones in future will be the problem-triggers in their groups –ever contributing to group insecurity. They develop episodes of baseless fears that the actions of one member of the group will trouble him or her and hardly have problem solving skills.

Instead, they rush to make kinds of security alarms (scream). The secure ones are excellent at making the team warm to belong to. They naturally absorb conflicts as they arise in the group and are always reassuring to the insecure ones.

The mix up of the personality traits helps to cause group learning and behavioral change for the better –a great deal. The registration of such will mean letting the group solve all its problems at their level without interferences of any sort by their superiors. The insecure and reserved ones will benefit greatly as they go on to develop social skills.

Internships play a pivotal role in developing key skills desirable for successfully managing general tasks in the organization. Such a successful parenting role by the organization is indeed its success as it will go on to reap high image and success from the efforts of high quality human resource. Achieving that takes time –more so for the organization to be sure that it has the right staff for sustainable business success.

It can however be different for those who wish to do quick hiring for the usually temporary work. While that mixes well with the real pleasure of the recruiters who want to execute the contract quickly and get their pay, it can as well adversely affect the efficient and quality of work results.

Building a formidable team that is easily absorbed into the organization culture takes time. The time specially needed is one meant for theory and practice in group dynamics that is later complimented by instructions and periodical reminders about the organization objectives and activities for the successful realization of its goal.

While constant reminders are made to the team about their main focus in working with a given organization or at any other human interaction levels amidst challenges, together they can develop strategies towards to reach its goal side-by-side with cementing group solidarity. Such reminders happen in a meeting arrangement, emailing each other, sending messages by phone and surprise visits to each other.

The group can decide to meet daily or weekly but not later than that. Important conflict resolution strategies are constant yet healthy communication between members of the team, empathetic understanding, engagement of standby yet reputable third party within the group, and conducting regular meetings over strategy formulation and dealing with group disagreements.