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Building and maintaining cohesive teams requires bringing together employees to jointly pursue common goals. According to Alghamdi and Bach (2018), teamwork is defined as the process where two or more workers interdependently interact towards a common goal. Therefore, the initial step in creating a team is having a well-defined purpose expressing the desired outcomes. Additionally, the team with the characteristics that match the purpose is assembled and interrelationships within and among teams are developed. Such steps are evident at New Seasons Market in the creation of the Green Teams. Firstly, the purpose is properly defined, which is to address the social and environmental issues of sustainability within the stores and the surrounding communities. The objective is to tackle the green issues in the store. With the purpose defined, the teams are assembled comprising 13 paid employee from different departments.
Establishing the interrelationships within and among the teams is also evident at New Seasons market. The corporate managers oversee the operations of the teams and they also have their own green team. The interactions are manifested by the monthly meetings in which reporting is done to the sustainability coordinators. Establishing leadership in team building is also a critical step, especially since leadership maintains the team cohesion (Sabanci & Ozdemir, 2015). New Seasons Markets team leadership vary across the teams with each team adopting the leadership structure they like. The functioning of the teams, the unified goals pursued, and the sense of direction indicate that team-building steps have been followed.
The green teams at New Seasons Market can be described as self-managing teams. By definition, the self-managing teams have a significant amount of autonomy to make decisions about the issues such as strategy formulation, problem-solving, conflict management, and performance evaluation among others (Smith & Pazos, 2018). In literature, the emergence of self-managing teams was driven by the search for team efficiency and improved performance and flexibility. In other words, self-managing teams are considered as an optimal approach to team management. Such teams are more agile because they can easily adapt to emerging needs and changing requirements. The key defining feature is the level of autonomy afforded to these teams as compared to other types of teams. However, it is important to emphasize that the autonomy is not absolute as they are often part of a bigger organization lead by superior personnel. The team objectives have to be aligned with the corporate objectives meaning the top management has a considerable say in guiding the teams.
The main characteristics that make the Green Teams self-managing include the fact that they have the autonomy to select their own leadership structures. Some have selected single chairpersons serving for more than one year while others regularly rotate their leaders. Other teams have resorted to electing two co-chairs to lead the cause pursued by the team. Such differences indicate a lack of managerial control of the operations of the team. According to Skripak et al (2016), a manager may determine the overall goals but the execution and control of the activities lie with the teams. The Green teams have been given an objective and they decide the activities to undertake in pursuit of the objectives.
The Green Teams at New Seasons Market can be described as successful teams. There are several metrics of determining successful teams as illustrated by Estafanous (2019). Teams are successful when they have a sense of direction and clarity of purpose. Green Teams have specific objectives that they pursue and they all move in the same direction. Secondly, successful teams are highly connected where there is a sense of trust and psychological safety. The Green Teams come together and achieve more than they can individually. They report to sustainability coordinators who makes sure all the teams are aligned. Thirdly, alignment allows teams to share a common understanding of the stakeholders and that of the corporate strategy. At New Seasons Market, the green teams are evidently aligned in that they all pursue the same objectives and share knowledge regularly. Lastly, high performance is a feature of successful teams that allows them to get things done. The Green Teams have this characteristic as evidenced by their current accomplishments.
All teams encounter various problems in their daily operation that could derail their performance. Firstly, there may be a lack of the necessary leadership qualities necessary to facilitate teamwork. The current Green Teams seem to be operating well enough with their distinct leadership structures. It can only be assumed that each team has the leadership qualities needed within their selected structure. However, a change in the scenario where the leaders in place are ineffective then the teams would stall and fail to achieve their objectives. Such a scenario is more evident in new organizations as explained by Sandoff and Nilson (2016). Other challenges include the lack of trust among the team members with the outcome being poor interaction and declining commitment to the teams. Lastly, a lack of long-term thinking may eventually lead to the collapse of teams when the sense of direction is lost. Such a problem may also occur when the team goals are badly perceived and when teams fail to deliver results.
The teams at New Seasons Market are self-managing, meaning there are changes that the members will not always get along. I would suggest that the conflict resolutions should be handled by an external party who is neutral but it should intervene only in severe conflicts. Management involvement in conflict resolution is a critical decision where one had to decide between leaving the teams to solve their own problems or to get involved (Brett & Goldberg, 2017). Minor conflicts can be resolved within the teams because each has a leader who can handle such situations. Severe conflicts, however, could damage the entire teams and a more careful approach may be deemed necessary. Team meetings can be used to discuss the causes of conflicts and to determine alternative solutions to the teams conflicts.
Improving the performance of a team may require improving those aspects that make up an effective team and those that boost teamwork. Recommendations include building trust among the members and across all the Green Teams since they all pursue the same goals and hope for the same outcomes. Trusting teams can easily share ideas and knowledge leading to better performance. Secondly, tuning the teams to best practices such as proper preparations and engaging them in the planning of the team activities. When all members contribute towards something they all feel part of it and are more likely to commit. Rewards can also be a performance booster where best-performing teams are rewarded or even acknowledge.
References
Alghamdi, A., & Bach, C. (2018). Developing teamwork at workplace [PDF document].
Brett, J., & Goldberg, S. (2017). How to handle a disagreement on your team. Harvard Business Review.
Estafanous, J. (2019). The five best metrics for measuring team success. RallyBright.
Sabanci, A., & Ozdemir, I. (2015). Team leadership: Leadership role achievement in supervision teams in Turkey. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 5(3), 243-260. Web.
Sandoff, M., & Nilson, K. (2016). How staff experience teamwork challenges in a new organizational structure. Team Performance Management, 22(7/8), 415-427. Web.
Skripak, S., Cortes, A., & Walz, A. (2016). Teamwork in business. Pamplin College of Business and Virginia Tech Libraries.
Smith, N., & Pazos, P. (2018). Self-managing team performance: A systematic review of multilevel input factors. Small Group Research, 49(1), 3-33. Web.
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