Page 126 - DMGT520_ORGANIZATION_CHANGE_AND_DEVELOPMENT

Unit 8: Team and Group Intervention

3. It helps developing communication within the group and inter-group and overcoming Notes
many psychological barriers that block communication flow.
However, team-building has been termed as one-sided effort and it suffers from the following
limitations:
1. It focuses only on work groups and other major organizational variables such as technology,
structure, etc., are not given adequate attention.
2. Team-building becomes a complicated exercise when there is frequent change in team
members. New member may find it difficult to adjust with the team because of his confusion
over his roles in terms of task performance and building good relationships.
In spite of these problems, team-building has a positive outlook. However, it is not that effective
in isolation. Therefore, there have been calls for combining team-building with organization
behaviour modification approaches. One such suggestion is to use a task hierarchy to reinforce
the team as it progresses up a behaviour skill hierarchy (for example, listening, communicating,
monitoring, and feedback skills).

8.2 Team Interventions

The OD team interventions involve working with the cross-functional self-managed and high
performance team. We will briefly define them as follows:

Cross-Functional Teams

Cross-functional teams are typically comprised of individuals who have a functional home
base, for example, manufacturing, designing, marketing. HR and who meet regularly to solve
ongoing challenges requiring input from a number of functional areas such teams might be
temporary or permanent. Cross-functional teams are widely used in the organisations, and OD
approaches have great utility in the formation and functioning of these teams.
Large companies such as Motorola, Ford, 3M, and General Electric as well as many small and
medium organisations have them.

High Performance Teams

High performance teams reflect strong extension of the basic characteristics of the teams: with
deeper sense of purpose, more ambitious performance goals, more complete approaches and
interchangeable as well as complementary skills.
Team interventions in OD tend to be in congruence with the characteristics of the high performance
teams.

8.3 Broad Team Building Interventions

The most important single group of interventions in OD are teambuilding activities, the goals
of which are the improvement and increased effectiveness of various teams within the
organisations.
Team interventions are typically directed towards four main areas:
1. Diagnosis
2. Task accomplishments

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