ADVANTAGES AND
DISADVANTAGES OF TEAMS
• Rose Marie Bravo
- “One of the things I think people overlook is the quality of
the team.”
-“It isn’t one person, and it isn’t two people. It is a whole group
of people—a team that works cohesively towards a goal—that makes
something happen or not.”
ADVANTAGES OF TEAMS
• Research on British coal mining in the 1940s and the Japanese
economic miracle of the 1970s and a huge number of investigations
since then have revealed that under the right conditions, teams:
• Make better decision
• Develop better products and services due to more knowledge and
expertise
• Create more engaged workforce compared to employees working alone.
• Allow team members to quickly share information and coordinate tasks
• Provide superior customer service because they provide more breadth of
knowledge and expertise.
ADVANTAGES OF TEAMS
• Motivations when working in teams:
Employees have a drive to bond and are motivated to fulfill the goals of groups to which
they belong
People are motivated because they are accountable to fellow team members, who
monitor performance more closely than a traditional supervisor.
Under some circumstances, performance improve when employees work near others
because co-worker become benchmarks of comparison
Employees are motivated to work harder because of apprehension that their performance
will be compared to others’ performance
DISADVANTAGES OF TEAMS
• Individuals better/faster on some tracks
When individuals have all the necessary knowledge and skills
When work cannot be divided into specialized tasks
When work is not complex enough to benefit from specialization
• Process losses – resources (including time and energy) expended towards
team development and maintenance rather than the task.
• Brooks’ Law – also called the “mythical man-month”, this principle says that
adding more people to late software project only make it later
• Social Loafing – occurs when people exert less effort (and usually perform at
a lower level) when working in teams than when working alone. It is most
likely to occur in large teams where individual output is difficult to identify.
 How to minimize social Loafing
Make individual performance more visible
• Form smaller teams
• Specialize tasks
• Measure individual performance
Increase employee motivation
• Make task interesting
• Objective needs to be important (pressure from team members to perform well)
• Select members who value team membership and believe in working towards
the team’s objectives
• Teams can be very powerful forces for competitive advantage, or
they can be much more trouble than they are worth, so much so
that job performance and morale decline when employees are
placed in teams. To understand when teams are better than
individuals working alone, we need to more closely examine the
conditions that make teams effective or ineffective.
END!