eight ways to build collaborative teams

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams 1

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

Dana Obeid

Organizational Behavior

Professor Nikki Lebo

March 29, 2015


Article Summary

The article focuses on how to build successful collaborative larger teams that links to

success of an organization. Executing complex initiatives like acquisitions, merger or an IT

overhaul requires a span of knowledge that can be provided only by teams that are large, diverse,

virtual, and composed of highly qualified team members. While the very same characteristics

becomes a problem in collaborative teams, the authors of this article focuses on what can an

organization, executives and team members do to build a successful team. This article shows the

research done by professors that studied 55 large teams and identified those with strong

collaboration despite their complexity. The main agenda was to examine the team dynamics and

environment at various firms in all kind of industries ranging from financial firms, media

companies, an oil and Gas Company, telecommunication firms, and a hospitality firm. The

authors came out with eight success factors that are: signature relationship practices, role models

of collaboration among executives, the establishment of a gift culture in which managers support

employees by mentoring, training in relationship skills, sense of community, ambidextrous

leadership skills or leaders who are both task-oriented and relationship-oriented, good use of

heritage relationships as well as role clarity and task ambiguity. In most of the companies, teams

are growing larger and companies constantly thrive to change their team practices due to

economic down turns, virtual teams, diversity and globalization. The new complexity of teams

requires organizations to increase their capacity for collaboration, by making long-term

investments that build relationships and trust and smart near-term decisions about how teams are

formed and run.


Critical Thinking

The reasons for lack of collaboration were mainly due to time difference, communication

gaps, organizational culture and the age. After reading this article, I think some of the steps can

truly overcome the problem of team collaboration. I feel some of very powerful factors that lead

to success in building of collaborative team that concerns with the leader or a manager are

building relationships, fostering communication, modeling collaborative behavior, and

demonstrating the skills that are both task as well as relationship oriented among the team

members. While some of the factors for building successful collaborative teams that team

members should focus on are building trust for their leader, maintaining relationships, and

understanding the role as well as the tasks complexity of individual in the team. Above all to

build the successful collaborative teams, an organization should have support from top tier

executives and the strategic human resource management that aligns the goals of an organization

to individual’s goal which are in-turn tied to performance management systems.

I completely agree with the authors about the required leadership traits and skills for

managing the larger teams. I feel the team leaders of fairly large teams should have conflict

management skills, skills for creating the perception of fairness among team members, and skills

for building and maintaining relationships with and among team members.


References

Eight ways to build collaborative teams. (n.d.). Retrieved March 29, 2015, from

Harvard Business Review website: https://hbr.org/2007/11/

eight-ways-to-build-collaborative-teams/

eight ways to build collaborative teams

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