Team leadership Effective team performance derives from several fundamental characteristics. First, team members need to successfully integrate their individual actions. They have specific and unique roles, where the performance of each role contributes to collective success. This means that the causes of team failure may reside not only in member inability, but also in their collective failure to coordinate and synchronize their individual contributions. Team processes become a critical determinant of team performance, and often mediate the influences of most other exogenous variables. Second, teams are increasingly required to perform in complex and dynamic environments. This characteristic applies particularly to organizational teams, and especially to top management teams. The operating environment for today's organizational teams features multiple stakeholders with sometimes clashing agendas, high information load, dynamic situational contingencies, and increased tempo of change. Advances in communication technology have made the use of virtual teams (i.e., teams whose members are not physically collocated) more practical and prominent in industry. These performance requirements heighten the need for member coordination. Further, because of the greater rate of change in today's environment, team members need to operate more adaptively when coordinating their actions. Team leadership represents a third characteristic of effective team performance. Most teams contain certain individuals who are primarily responsible for defining team goals and for developing and structuring the team to accomplish these missions. These roles exist even in self-managing teams, although the conduct of leadership roles in such teams varies considerably from similar roles in more traditional teams. However, the success of the leader in defining team directions and organizing the team to maximize progress along such directions contributes significantly to team effectiveness. Indeed, we would argue that effective leadership processes represent perhaps the most critical factor in the success of organizational teams. Despite the ubiquity of leadership influences on organizational team performance, and despite large literatures on both leadership and team/group dynamics, we know surprisingly little about how leaders create and manage effective teams. Previous leadership theories have tended to focus on how leaders influence collections of subordinates, without attending to how leadership fosters the integration of subordinate actions (i.e., how leaders promoted team processes. Extract: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(01)00093-5 

QUESTION 1 (20 Marks) The case study asserts that most teams contain certain individuals who are primarily responsible for defining team goals and for developing and structuring the team to accomplish these missions. These roles exist even in self-managing teams, although the conduct of leadership roles in such teams varies considerably from similar roles in more traditional teams. Through the lens of “functional leadership”, identify and discuss the team leader functions QUESTION 2 (20 Marks). The case study highlights that team processes become a critical determinant of team performance, and often mediate the influences of most other exogenous variables. As a result, a range of options to motivate staff will often differ from organisation to organisation and therefore it is important to consider what are the unique motivators for an organisation. In general, there are two main theoretical approaches to motivation, the content and process approaches. Within the stream of content approaches, identify and discuss the FIVE (5) levels of a motivation theory which asserts that men’s needs are arranged in a hierarchy of prepotency, thus the emergence of a new need depends on the satisfaction of more basic needs. 

QUESTION 3 (20 Marks) Organisational culture has been a complex concept owing the varying understandings of the term. Hence, definitions could be narrow or broader, depending on how people choose to look at what should constitute or not constitute organisational culture. On the other hand, organisational climate has more do to with how individuals inside the organisation perceive or view the various activities of the organisation. Contrast the concepts of Organisational Culture and Organisational Climate. 

QUESTION 4 (20 Marks) Players of a certain South African premier league team are disappointed about the manner in which the team manager treats them during their training sessions. As a result, the team’s performance has been so dismal in the past five matches. The club board has decided to hire you as a consultant on how best to improve teamwork for better performance. Draw up a proposal providing the basics for championing efforts to improve teamwork and training people to build high-performance teams 

QUESTION 5 (20 Marks) Workplace conflict is an inevitable phenomenon of organizational life. It is a major theme of occupational/social psychology and organizational behavior. Some organizational researchers opine that conflict is terrible, damaging and destructive to organization and to employees as well. It plunders the quality of group decision making; reduces creativity and innovation, mess up team success, and reduces trust among employees. It can be concluded that workplace conflict is neither all together bad nor beneficial rather its nature, parties involved, circumstances, and other related variables decide that either it is productive or counterproductive. 

Discuss in detail the FIVE (5) possible causes of conflict in organizational life.

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1 Functional leadership refers to a leadership approach that focuses on the specific functions or roles that leaders play within a team In the context of the case study the team leader functions can b... View the full answer