Building Teams: Exploring Teamwork and Leadership Dynamics in Practice

This assignment explores the dynamics of building effective teams, drawing insights from the Marshmallow Challenge. It emphasizes the importance of teamwork, free-thinking, and collaborative efforts in achieving successful outcomes. The assignment highlights that successful team building involves focusing on results rather than solely relying on rewards, as evidenced by the superior performance of children in the Marshmallow Challenge. The assignment also relates the principles of team building to the context of student group assignments, illustrating the challenges and importance of cooperation in achieving academic success. The provided references support the discussion with relevant research on leadership, team building, and high-performance teams.

Running head: BUILDING TEAMS 1
Building Teams
Name
Institution

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Team Building
The experience in this story teaches us the importance of teamwork more so from
Marshmallow challenge (Wujec, 2010). It also shows that building successful team requires free
spirit, working together after shelving personal experience and working collectively as one. This
is demonstrated by children building best towers than adults, owing to the fact that they have no
experience. Besides, the experience shows that when there is a team, every single person has no
limits or restrictions to follow to get the best results (Ammeter & Dukerich, 2002).
When I want to build a team, I will focus on producing results rather than offering high
rewards to get things done. It is evident that when rewards are higher, team members often focus
on the money and not the quality of performance and thus ultimately fail to deliver on
expectations (Wujec, 2010). Evidently, children built best towers since they are not aware of the
economic importance of what they are doing. As such, they focus producing the best results. The
same concept applies to building teams.
The phenomenon in this video depicts behaviors by students when tutors give us group
assignments. Some group members are not corporative despite knowing the importance of the
assignment in their academic career. The situation is often characterized by last-minute meetings
to rush over the assignment which eventually leads to poor research and ultimately low grades.

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References
Ammeter, A. P., & Dukerich, J. M. (2002). Leadership, team building, and team member
characteristics in high performance project teams. Engineering Management
Journal, 14(4), 3-10.
Wujec, T. (2010). Build a Tower, Build a Team. TED. Retrieved from
https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower

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