Leadership Case

Employees tend to perform more efficiently working in teams, as opposed to alone. The different reasons for teams being more effective than individuals include; an evenly distributed workload, more creativeness amongst the group due to good team chemistry, healthy competition leading to improved work and increased overall speed of completion for a project. Through the use of teams when planning, organizing, leading and supervising, organizations can potentially become more efficient, run more effectively and provide greater services.

When a person works alone on a task it could potentially take much more time and effort to complete that task, then if they were working with a team on the same task. A reason for this is the ability to evenly distribute a workload among several people. To think of this on the simplest level, think of a group of four people. Theoretically each group member should do twenty-five percent of the work. Therefore, it should be four times as quick to complete any particular task. In reality, it doesn't always work this way; however, having more members to complete a particular task will be beneficial. You can divide the task based on the actual strengths of each member, thereby increasing the group's efficiency. If a particular member excels at advertising, it makes sense to utilize that person's skill and assign any tasks to do with advertising to that person. Likewise, if another member of a team has computer skills, it would make sense for that person to be in charge of running the website, or any other computer centric tasks. By utilizing a person's specific skills, you set the team up for having success. "Trained, diverse and mature teams are better at addressing such problems than individuals or other groups. From training and experience, they dig deep for the root causes." (Lee, 2001) If a group has to do tasks which no particular member is particularly proficient at they still have several options, and advantages over someone working alone. For one, they still have the brainpower of multiple people. In that sense they can work through potential difficulties together and avoid the problems that a single person could run in to if they have a sudden block in their thoughts. Secondly, even if no one on the team has very much knowledge of a particular assignment, the mass brainpower of the team is extremely beneficial. By using everyone harmoniously a team has a greater chance at coming up with a viable solution to a problem.

Having only one person working on a particular task creates problems with creativity due to lack of multiple channels of thought. Working in team on tasks can solve this problem by having more people providing creative ideas to the thought process. Group creativeness comes when you have good team chemistry and an understanding of all the people with which you are working. "A team is not a group of people who like each other or