Team building

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term 'team building' can refer generally to the selection and motivation of result oriented teams, or more specifically to group self-assessment in the theory and practice of organizational development.

When a team in an organizational development context embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it can be argued that it is engaging in team building, although this may be considered a narrow definition.

The process of team building includes,

  • clarifying the goal, and building ownership across the team and
  • identifying the inhibitors to teamwork and removing or overcoming them, or if they cannot be removed, mitigating their negative effect on the team.

To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:

  • its current strengths as a team
  • its current weakness

To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:

  • identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
  • design a gap-closure strategy

[edit] See also