Individual Essay: Importance of Teamwork in the Workplace

This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of the importance of teamwork in the workplace, using Tesco as a practical example. It begins by defining teamwork and differentiating it from a group, then delves into various team types such as project teams, self-managed teams, and virtual teams. The essay highlights the crucial role of teamwork in fostering a loyal and friendly environment, promoting unity, and enhancing productivity. It explores how teamwork leads to greater opportunities, diversified thoughts, and improved problem-solving approaches. The essay also examines how teamwork increases productivity through shared workloads, faster task completion, and improved performance optimization. Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of communication, collaboration, and employee appreciation in maximizing team productivity, and concludes by summarizing the key role of teamwork in achieving organizational objectives and driving success.

INDIVIDUAL ESSAY
(Importance of team work in the workplace)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................1
Definition of teamwork...............................................................................................................1
Difference between team and group...........................................................................................1
Difference types of teams............................................................................................................2
Importance of teamwork.............................................................................................................2
Productivity.................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................4
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................5

INTRODUCTION
Teamwork is defined as the combination and ability of a group of individuals working
collectively in order to attain a common objective or task (Ghaferi and Dimick, 2016). Present
study is based on Tesco ,It was found in 1919 (by Jack Cohen) and in the present scenario ,Tesco
is on of the largest retailer in the world. Tesco's key business is retailing in United Kingdom,
which provides the company with 60% of all the sales and profits. Tesco provides the widest
range of food products in UK compared to any other retailer. The study contains a brief
definition of teamwork, further it will discuss difference between team and group, different types
of teams, importance of teamwork and how teamwork increase the productivity level in Tesco.
MAIN BODY
Definition of teamwork
Teamwork can be defined as an activity or combined actions of a group of interdependent
individuals working together in a team in order to achieve a common objective. The members of
a team required should be of adequate size I.e. of about 6-8 members. The success of an
organisation is depending upon an effective teamwork. There should be a high level of
interdependency among the team members, which promotes open communication between the
members, increase of trust and risk-taking (Gustavsson, 2016). Interdependency leads to group
dynamics, which is the way of interaction between the team members. Healthy dynamics provide
higher satisfaction level and leads to more efficient working all together.
Difference between team and group
Team is generally considered as a group of individuals collectively working to attain a
common objective in the most effective and efficient way whereas Group is a collection of
individuals working together to complete a task. A team required more than one team leader for
the functioning of the team and A group required only one leader. The members in a team are
interdependent whereas in a group, the members are independent (Tseng, Morris and Tang,
2015). In a team ,the work or the objective is discussed ,decided and then done but in a group the
task is discussed ,decided and then delegated to the members. The focus of a team is to
accomplish team goals and for a group the focus is on accomplishing individual goals as team
members share a common cause or goal and group may not share a common goal. In a team, all
the members are aware of each other's weaknesses and strengths whereas in a group members
may not know each other. As far as productivity is concerned it is large in team due to collective
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team efforts and in group the productivity is large as a results of individuals in a group
(Lindsjørn and et.al., 2016).
Difference types of teams
The different types of teams consists of Project team,Self managed team,Virtual
team ,Operational team, Problem-solving team.
Project team: Tesco has project team which consists of group of employees who work
together and share common goals and strategies. This team of Tesco, structure the work in a
specific, measurable and time constrained manner, the roles and responsibilities are assigned in a
clear way with the specific deadlines (Bravo, Lucia-Palacios and Martin, 2016). It helps Tesco to
accomplish its objectives effectively.
Self-managed teams: The members of Tesco have self-managed employees , the
members specify the rules and expectations, bare the shared responsibilities and solve problems.
The advantage of this to Tesco is that it improves motivation because of inter-
dependency ,provide opportunities to manage own time and handle the task when given to
employees, when the responsibilities are shared by the employees it creates a sense of pride in
team accomplishment.
Virtual team: Tesco creates virtual teams which enable the distributed or dispersed
teams to get the things done by communication technology such as FAX, videos, emails, voice
conferencing services in order to collaborate with other the team members (Ghaferi and Dimick,
2016).
Problem-solving team: It is another kind of team that works to solve particular issues.
For example technical team works to resolve IT issues in the company, they continuous monitor
working of technologies so that employees do not find any trouble during work (Tseng, Morris
and Tang, 2015).
Importance of teamwork
Teamwork environment can help Tesco to promote a loyal and friendly environment.
These close relationships among team members can help the employees to motivate them to
work harder, be cooperative and can support each other. A teamwork promotes unity in the
workplace of Tesco and creates an environment where team members become more focused on
overall development of the company (Lindsjørn and et.al., 2016). Eventually, it can lead to a
healthy and efficient working environment. A good teamwork can offer the organisation with
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greater opportunities, diversified thoughts, promotes creativity, and problem solving approaches.
Team efforts allow the members to give quick feedbacks. When the teamwork strategies are
incorporated, members become more productive and efficient, the reason behind the productivity
is that the workload is shared, it reduces the pressure on the individual (Bravo, Lucia-Palacios
and Martin, 2016). Tesco promotes teamwork rather than individual work as it promotes faster
completion of tasks, improve optimization of performance, increase pace of work, and provide
job satisfaction. Teamwork also encourages workplace synergy as Tesco believes in shared
goals, co -operation by mutual support, teamwork offer great learning opportunities because the
team members can learn from each other’s mistake. Members would able to avoid further
mistakes, gain insights, learn new concepts from the senior colleagues. A teamwork environment
results a great success and growth of Tesco (Ghaferi and Dimick, 2016). For example, Tesco
wanted to improve quality of its products thus, it has made changes in warehousing activities. All
the team members have supported the management and they have worked extra hours to malign
quality and warehousing activities of Tesco. Management has implemented new technologies for
raising working efficiency and minimising operational mistakes. All the involved people have
helped the managers in order to implement these technique successfully. This has resulted in
raising customer satisfaction to great extent.
Productivity
Great productivity can come from effective teamwork. Tesco believes that teams who
work together effectively have the greater productivity than the individuals who work
individually. Giving team members the ownership or letting them take the charge for their own
work and decisions provide them great opportunity to increase the productivity (Tseng, Morris
and Tang, 2015).
Communication plays a vital role in contributing largely in team productivity. The project
manager of Tesco ensures effective communication between the team members in order to
avoids communication barriers ,as miscommunication can often lead to multiple confusion and
breeds to a lot of failure. In order to increase the productivity, collaboration and effective work
management ,Tesco has employed a project management software (Lindsjørn and et.al., 2016).
Employees gives their best efforts when they're given with some appreciation and appraisal.
Tesco appreciate their employees by implement incentives programs in order to keep the
employees motivated, A motivated employee can contribute more in the work and can increase
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the productivity. The employees of Tesco are given with the environment where they're allowed
to do things their own way, by this the interest of the employees remain constant (Importance of
Team and Team Work, 2019).
Most important factor to increase the productivity is to introduce a feedback process in a
team, Members are given with constructive feedback and performance reviews to boost team
productivity. Tesco provide their employees with constant encouragement, support and feedback
in order to increase the productivity level (Ghaferi and Dimick, 2016). Empowering team to be at
the best productivity level requires a lot of efforts by the leader. Team leader plays an important
role in influencing its team member to get best out of them.
CONCLUSION
From the above study of Tesco, it can be summarised that Teamwork plays a crucial role in
attainment of organisational objective. Different objectives require different types of team which
varies from goals to goals. A team can work more effectively than an individual working
individually. The productivity can be attained when the company works as a team .A leader
inspire its team members by how they can use certain techniques and strategies to achieve
organisational objectives. Tesco presumes that an effective teamwork can lead their organisation
to greater heights
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Bravo, R., Lucia-Palacios, L. and Martin, M. J., 2016. Processes and outcomes in student
teamwork. An empirical study in a marketing subject. Studies in Higher Education.
41(2). pp.302-320.
Ghaferi, A. A. and Dimick, J. B., 2016. Importance of teamwork, communication and culture on
failure‐to‐rescue in the elderly.British Journal of Surgery. 103(2). pp.e47-e51.
Gustavsson, T., 2016. Distributed project teamwork metrics: A quantitative project teamwork
behavior analytics study of Projectplace.
Lindsjørn, Y. and et.al., 2016. Teamwork quality and project success in software development: A
survey of agile development teams.Journal of Systems and Software. 122. pp.274-286.
Tseng, H., Morris, B. and Tang, Y., 2015, March. The importance of teamwork trust, social
presence, and cognitive presence in an online collaborative learning environment.
InSociety for Information Technology & Teacher Education International
Conference (pp. 538-541). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education
(AACE).
Online
Importance of Team and Team Work. 2019. [Online]. Available through <
https://www.managementstudyguide.com/importance-of-team.htm>
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