Team Cohesiveness and Its Outcomes in Business World

Introduction

When referring to team cohesiveness, most people will feel it abstract and vague, and people cannot image what team cohesiveness is exactly. When I was an undergraduate student in my university, my class was always the best no matter in academic field or other activities among the whole classes in the same year. Other people often said that our class was cohesive and we were a cohesive group. So I am wondering what is cohesiveness and what outcomes that cohesiveness can make in real business world.

Although cohesiveness sounds puzzling, it is still crucial in the society. Team cohesiveness is a popular topic since after I typed cohesiveness” to search in the library, it came out more than twenty one thousand results. People have paid a lot of attention to this topic and have done many researches. In another hand, the number of the results can support that cohesiveness is vital in the world; otherwise, people would not to do these researches. In addition, previous researches have showed the importance of cohesiveness. It has been noted that “the Federal Aviation Administration estimates that in 80 percent of crashes, pilots made mistakes that could be prevented if the crew worked together better.” (Goleman, 1995; Cherniss, 1998, p. 26)

In this paper，the focus will be team cohesiveness and its outcomes in many different kinds of organizations。Cohesiveness has been observed and studied early in the middle of 19th century, and was identified as “the total field of forces which act on members to remain in the group” and may be defined operationally as the “average for all members of the resultant force toward remaining in the group” (Festinger, Schachter, Back, 1950), and was lately defined as “The willingness to stick together” (Dion, 2000) Cohesiveness was discovered that it can create some beneficial outcomes for companies. For example, higher level of cohesiveness will result in stronger competitiveness, better performance and higher productivity in different organizations.

I am curious about the differences of the influence of cohesiveness on task completeness between small firms and big companies in a certain field like advertisement.

Literature Review

Definition

Sicne cohesiveness is an abstract iteam and it is hard to image what cohesiveness is exactly, we need to find out the definition of cohesiveness. There were many definitions during several decades of study of cohesiveness.

The earliest modern cohesiveness was conceptualized and defided that cohesiveness is “the total field of forces which act on members to remain in the group”. And another operational definition was “average for all members of the resultant force toward remaining in the group”