Work Groups and Teams

Often people confuse work groups and work teams. You will discuss the differences to form a better understanding of these terms.

• What is the difference between a work group and a work team?
• If you know nothing else about it, how would you tell if selected employees working together are a work group or work team?
• Provide a simple example of each from your own experience.

Just do response # 1 to 3 only down below.

Posted 1

According to Robbins and Judge (2019), work group is a group of people that communicates to share information, make decision as well as assist group members within his or her area of responsibility. This type of group does not work together and collaborate. Each and everyone has a task that they must complete individually to complete a project. On the other hand a work team is a group of people who comes together to meet and end goal. They communicate, collaborate and everyone has an input on every part of the project.

Work group for example is a group that is assigned to a group has individual responsibility. They are given a task but each individual must complete their own assignment. Work team works together to meet a goal, they collaborate, for example if their task was to come up with a slogan for a product, everyone will have a task to research and bring it to the table and as a team will utilize those information and collaborate to come up with a slogan.

I manage a retail store, I had 2 assistant manager and couple sales people. Everyone had a job role and duties, however at the end of the day we as a team a goal to meet. We need to meet our monthly sales goal and at the same time be profitable. So I had to keep track of our operations part of the business such as inventory, cash handling, and I have tasked my assistants to assist the sales team with making sure we are pushing the right products to help us meet our goal, my sales people made sure they were informing the customers with all the promotions we had and always ask for the sale, at the end of each day we come together and give feedbacks such as success and obstacle then we collaborate on what we can do better to tackle our goals for tomorrow. We as a team had our own duties, but at the same we came together as a team to make sure we meet our goal.

Posted 2

For me there is a clear and obvious delineation between a Work Group and a Work Team. Observe the flow of output and inputs, if they are unidirectional, i.e. one person’s output is another’s persons input, with no additional exchange you have a Work Group. Or as defined in our text, interactions “to share information, make decisions, and help each group member perform within his or her area of responsibility.” (Robbins, 2019, p. 325) This grouping is characteristically seen in corporate culture. For example, a sales director and an engineering director might work closely with each other, but their cooperation is to meet their own specific needs. The Sales director might take design status or product details from the engineering director to prepare sales materials for perspective clients, but that interaction ends there. The direction could be reversed where as the director of engineering is taking input from the sales director as to what the market is looking for, but again that is the extent of the interaction.

Now in comparison, within a Work Team the flow of outputs and inputs are multi directional, with additional exchanges of real time feedback. Instead of just taking an output product and converting it for one need, additional value is added to the product and circulated back out. At each iteration the members of the team use the prior output but at the same time continue to add to it increasing the overall value. Groups like this can be seen most often in problem solving teams. For example, in complicated failure mode investigations work teams are invaluable. Subject matter experts seeing the same problem from different points of view and building upon the knowledge and findings of the others. Building momentum from each until true root cause can be verified.

Posted 3

According to Robbins and Judge(2019) , A work group is a group that interacts primarily to share information, make decisions, and help each group member perform within his or her area of responsibility. A work team, on the other hand, generates positive synergy through coordination. The individual efforts result in a level of performance greater than the sum of the individual inputs. A work group can be a number of individuals working on one thing, but they are all using their own ideas and skills to get to the same goals. A work team is when each person has an assigned task that they have to do in order for the team to be successful. For example, I use to work in as a fast food restaurant manager, and my job was to push out the food as fast as I can while keeping the drive thru time down. While I was in charge of my crew on first shift, there was another manager who handled the night shift. Overall, we as a team had to have combined totals for each day that were above the average required. The only thing I can think of as a work group, was when I was in grade school, and the teacher would break us up in groups in the class, and she would have us work on a project, but each individual would have to go up and present their portion of the project.

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