What is a team ?

A collection of people with a shared purpose and a commitment to working together

There is keen importance to working in team within the workplace. There are many benefits to working in a team also. Within the workplace you can have many different types of functioning teams.

A formal team is created for a specific purpose for example, it may be created to carry out a specific job such as interviewing applicants for a job. Members within the team will have specific tasks to carry out. Another example of a formal team could be a customer service team. Within a formal team there will be set out rules and regulations that the team will have to cohere to while being a part of this team. As any a formal team has it’s advantages and disadvantages. A key advantage to working as part of a formal team is that the team will be more organised and each member of the team will know exactly what their job role is within the team. A disadvantage to a formal team is that the team can come times become less sociable than many other teams.

An informal team develops in a less structured way within the work place. For example a group of new members might start a discussion group in the canteen about a way of improving the work practice. They might then pass the idea up through the chain of command. There is a few advantages and disadvantages to having an informal team, an advantage is that the team can provide more inspiration as there is less boredom. The team can also develop wider skills and can cover while other members are absent. A disadvantage to an informal team is that certain individuals can dominate the group as there is no real structure. Problems can also arise when decisions are adjusted to satisfy the minimum requirements of every member rather than the teams over all best interest.

A temporary team or also know as a task team are set up for a relatively short period of time to complete a task. They come together to agree on a team plan, and then they split up when the project is completed. For example, creating advertisements often involves bringing together teams of marketing specialists with different skills working for a particular client. There are benefits to working as a temporary team as people can learn new skills and are able to network with other individuals. The team will lose its worth its worth once the project is over this is the disadvantage to a temporary team.

A permanent team is one that works together continuously. Their work is frequently on going, for example if you have had previous retail experience you may have worked in a particular sales team. The same sales team will interact with customers in similar ways over an on going period of time. Roles and patterns of behaving become established in the team. An advantage to working as part of a permanent team is people can feel motivated and they wont want to let the team down. The team also has shared aims and targets to meet. A disadvantage is that teams can cause conflict as personalities can clash between members within the team. The mentality within the team as members only identified there own team and this then harms relationships between different teams and departments and harms communication in the organisation.

The size of a team is very important as it needs to be an appropriate number of individuals in the team. In a team its important o have a mix of people as when the task is handed out the speed in which decisions have to be made within certain time frames. If there is to many people within a team this can slow down tasks such as decision making.

It has been suggested that the ideal number of people to have within a team is five because of a number of reasons. the first reason is odd numbers avoids deadlock in decision making. An other reason being the team is sufficiently large to avoid mistakes that result from insufficient information, or the power of one individual from a fixed view.Lastly the