Week 5 Discussion Question-Work Teams-Nursing Paper Examples

What are some reasons work teams have become more prevalent in today’s organizations?

Work teams have become prevalent in today’s organizations since they accomplish tasks that would be difficult to achieve among single individuals. Work teams have become increasingly popular in fostering collaboration of people to solve complex and demanding organizational problems. As such, work teams are instrumental in generating creative solutions to problems while offering vital experiences to employees (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019).

Comprehensively selected teams bring together individuals to complete tasks accurately and effectively. Individual team members should be selected based on their abilities, leadership skills, and expertise. The members have different views on promoting adaptability, accuracy, and resolution. Of importance, individual team members work individually within their team but collaborate to complete tasks and contribute to the company’s well-being.

How do they provide a competitive advantage?

Working teams contribute to competitive advantage since individual teams with high expertise promote efficiency. The team members are also assigned specialized tasks, allowing them to complete tasks more accurately (Younus et al., 2019). Quality assurance and change management are popular work teams that accomplish organizational work. For instance, the quality assurance department inspects products and trains employees to promote quality.

Change management aims to incentivize new and innovative strategies to improve the organization. Most importantly, the corporate teams generate new knowledge by utilizing tacit and explicit information from individual team members. Leaders use tacit knowledge to enhance a team’s interactions and improve team synergism, which promotes a competitive advantage.

What are some ways teams can be “technology-enabled?”

Technology-enabled teams are becoming increasingly relevant in organizations based on the nature of work. Organizations should encourage the use of modern technology to complete tasks. In this case, organizations should acquire modern technology and train employees to utilize it effectively. Companies should deploy digital tools to improve collaboration during work and save time with time-consuming management tools (Song et al., 2019).

For instance, organizations can introduce Google calendars to manage scheduled activities or even business applications to keep employees updated. An organization should promote virtual teams by promoting technology-enabled meetings through video conferencing, instant messaging tools, and one-to-one video meeting software. For this reason, institutionally or geographically distributed teams use modern technology to complete organizational goals.

What are the challenges of virtual teams? How can leaders make virtual teams more effective?

Virtual teams have challenges that affect organizational efficiency. For instance, communication inefficiencies are likely to occur from failure in technology or even different communication styles. Some teams may prefer active and frequent correspondence, while others prefer sparse communication. Secondly, collaboration challenges since the physical distance make the team member feel disconnected. The lack of a shared environment and direct interactions makes it hard to create a shared team culture.

However, leaders can make virtual teams effective. For instance, leaders can make virtual teams effective through effective communication strategies. Thus, the leaders create communication guidelines on how and when the team members should communicate. The leaders should encourage continued communication and feedback. The leaders develop virtual ethical guidelines to codify behaviors and actions that drive virtual teams. The leaders should also recognize and reward better-performing teams for improving and encouraging efficiency.

What role does self-leadership play within a virtual team, and why is it important for this model of leadership?

Self-leadership plays an instrumental role in making virtual teams more effective. In a complex environment such as virtual teams, self-leadership models are essential since they allow leaders to control their behavior while leading and influencing themselves through specified cognitive and behavioral strategies (Castellano et al., 2021). In addition, self-leadership builds trust among virtual teams. Trust enhances performance, commitment, and positive virtual teams. Thus, self-oriented leaders have the commitment and potency to build high-performing virtual teams.

References

Aggarwal, I., & Woolley, A. W. (2019). Team creativity, cognition, and cognitive style diversity. Management Science, 65(4), 1586-1599.

Castellano, S., Chandavimol, K., Khelladi, I., & Orhan, M. A. (2021). Impact of self-leadership and shared leadership on the performance of virtual R&D teams. Journal of Business Research, 128, 578-586.

Song, Q., Wang, Y., Chen, Y., Benitez, J., & Hu, J. (2019). Impact of the usage of social media in the workplace on team and employee performance. Information & Management, 56(8), 103160.

Younus, S., Al-Alusi, A., Ahmad, R., & Obaidat, M. (2019). Synergism Paradigm and Effective Teamwork Mechanism. International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE), 8(1).