INTERNACIONALNI UNIVERZITET BRČKO DISTRIKT
( Saobraćajno inženjerstvo )
SEMINARSKI RAD
Subject: Engleski jezik II
Topics: The importance of Teaming
How to Stop Fighting in School and at Home with These 7 Tools
Mentor: Student:
Mr.sc Kristina Varcaković OS-202/12 Karić Amela
Brčko, May 2013
Content:
Introduction
...................................................................................................................................3
1. The Importance of Teaming ……………………………………………………………………4
1.2 Teaming is a verb ...................................................................................................................5
1.3 The answer lies in teaming ………………………………………………………………….6
2. How to Stop Fighting in School and at Home with These 7 Tools …………………………...12
Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................23
Literature .......................................................................................................................................24
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1. The Importance of Teaming
Editor's note: Many managers are taught to think of teams as carefully designed, static groups of
individuals who, like a baseball team or improv comedy troupe, have ample time to practice
interacting successfully and efficiently. The truth is, most corporate project teams don't have the
temporal luxury. Teams are often disbanded before they have a chance to gel, as individual
members are delegated to new projects—and therefore new teams—on a hectic as-need basis.
HBS Professor Amy Edmondson maintains that managers should think in terms of "teaming"—
actively building and developing teams even as a project is in process, while realizing that a
team's composition may change at any given moment. Teaming, she says, is essential to
organizational learning. She elaborates on this concept in her new book, "Teaming: How
Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy."
"Teaming calls for developing both affective (feeling) and cognitive (thinking) skills," she writes.
"Enabled by distributed leadership, the purpose of teaming is to expand knowledge and expertise
so that organizations and their customers can capture the value."
In the following excerpt, Edmondson describes the concept of teaming and explains its
importance to today's corporate environment.
In today's complex and volatile business environment, corporations and organizations also win or
lose by creating wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Intense competition, rampant
unpredictability, and a constant need for innovation are giving rise to even greater
interdependence and thus demand even greater levels of collaboration and communication than
ever before. Teaming is essential to an organization's ability to respond to opportunities and to
improve internal processes. This chapter aims to deepen your understanding of why teaming and
the behaviours it requires are so crucial for organizational success in today's environment. To
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help illuminate the teaming process and its benefits, the chapter defines teaming, places it within
a historical context, and presents a new framework for understanding organizational learning and
process knowledge, and explains why these are important concepts for today's leaders.
1.2 Teaming is a verb
Sports teams and musical groups are both bounded, static collections of individuals. Like most
work teams in the past, they are physically located in the same place while practicing or
performing together. Members of these teams learn how to interact. They've developed trust and
know each other's roles. Advocating stable boundaries, well-designed tasks, and thoughtfully
composed membership, many seminal theories of organizational effectiveness explained how to
design and manage just these types of static performance teams.
"Teaming is a verb. It is a dynamic activity, not a bounded, static entity."
Harvard psychologist Richard Hackman, a preeminent scholar of team effectiveness, established
the power of team structures in enabling team performance. According to this influential
perspective, well-designed teams are those with clear goals, well-designed tasks that are
conducive to teamwork, team members with the right skills and experiences for the task,
adequate resources, and access to coaching and support. Get the design right, the theory says, and
the performance will take care of itself. This model focused on the team as an entity, looking
largely within the well-defined bounds of a team to explain its performance. Other research,
notably conducted by MIT Professor Deborah Ancona, showed that how much a team's members
interact with people outside the team boundaries was also an important factor in team
performance. Both perspectives worked well in guiding the design and management of effective
teams, at least in contexts where managers had the lead-time and the run-time to invest in
composing stable, well-designed teams.
In these prior treatments, team is a noun. A team is an established, fixed group of people
cooperating in pursuit of a common goal. But what if a team disbands almost as quickly as it was
assembled? For example, what if you work in an emergency services facility where the staffing
changes every shift, and the team changes completely for every case or client? What if you're a
member of a temporary project team formed to solve a unique production problem? Or you're
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engage in a learning process in any meaningful sense—not in the way an individual can. Yet,
when individuals learn, this does not always create change in the ways the organization delivers
products and services to customers. This is a conundrum that has long fascinated academics.
This book offers a practical answer to the question of how organizational learning really happens:
Through teaming. Products and services are provided to customers by interdependent people and
processes. Crucial learning activities must take place, within those smaller, focused units of
action, for organizations to improve and innovate. In spite of the ovious need for change, most
large enterprises are still managed according to a powerful mindset I call organizing to execute.
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