High Performance Teams:The wave of the future in business

Many businesses are choosing to accomplish their goals and complete their tasks by using work teams instead of individual performance. Companies are grouping people together that complement each other that have different skills and abilities to work effectively and efficiently. They are maximizing employee’s strengths and minimizing their weaknesses. The key is for the team to become a high performance team and they can do that through a four stage process. The four stages to be analyzed;

• forming
• storming
• norming
• performing

The fifth stage will not be mentioned because the stage prepares the group for disbandment. Organizations have business and ethical considerations to research before they enter the global market. Globalization can also affect team dynamics in different ways.

A team will begin by entering the forming stage. The team members meet each other and learn the guidelines of the project. The goals, schedule, and expectations of the members will be presented at this stage. The members will be assigned their roles and will start getting to know each other. The behavior of the members at this stage is relatively formal. The next stage the team will enter is the storming stage. In this stage the members become comfortable with their assignments but are still unsure of the other members. They still portray individual behaviors and rely on their own point of view. Members are not ready to accept each other’s point of view or are quick to dismiss their ideas. The norming stage is next and the members begin to portray team behaviors over individual. They become more comfortable working as a team and with each other. The members are able to focus on the project issues and make decisions instead of focusing confrontations between members. Friendship can begin to form during this stage because the members get to know each other and discover the things they have in common. The final stage I will analyze is the performance stage. This is the stage the teams have to reach to become a high performance team. The members develop a high-level of trust with each other and learn to work efficiently together. The team members value each other’s point of view and debate the project issues effectively. This is the stage where teams are very productive and accomplish many successes for their organizations. A group of people working together is not a high performance team unless they have successfully completed and entered through all the four stages. The goal of any team is to enter and stay in the performance stage.

Globalization allows a company to enter into a whole new marketplace. They can generate more revenues, extend the life cycle of a product, or enter the marketplace of their foreign competitors. Globalization allows companies to enter their products into new markets and expand their customer base. This will help generate revenues and is a reason for a company to go global if the costs are lower than the revenues. Products are introduced into their home market first and once they develop the newer products they can enter the old ones as new products in different countries. This allows the product to extend its life cycle. Companies that enter their competitor’s home market will shift their competitor focus away from the company’s home market. Political views and communication can be negative effects on businesses that enter global markets. Unstable governments are risky areas for businesses to enter. The government in place might accept the company and the next government might not and the company could lose their investment in that country. Miscommunication or incorrect translations might cause a company a great deal of money. The company needs to make sure communication gaps between businesses do not exist.

Different cultures believe in different ways of doing business. A problem that might occur is that things that are deemed illegal in one country are accepted as common business practice in another. The employees will have to be informed that they still have to follow the laws of all countries involved. Companies that outsource or offshore jobs are taking the jobs away from the people in their own community. This could have an adverse affect on the community and the company’s reputation. Companies should realize who their suppliers are and how the products were made. Some countries make children work for very little or no money to produce their products. Products made in other countries do not follow the same safety and environmental standards that Americans follow. Other countries can make products cheaper than companies in the United States and company’s need to be aware of ethical dilemmas doing business globally can cause them.

Globalization can affect team dynamics positively and negatively. A negative effect of diverse cultures on a team is more conflicts. They are better in long-term situations than in short-term. In short-term projects the team may not be able to settle their conflicts before the project ends. They will not be able to realize the strengths of diversity because of the constant conflict management needed and focus from the project could be diverted. Long-term projects give the team enough time to work through the conflicts and learn to trust each other. The positive affect is the different views and attitudes from different cultures. Diverse teams will have more perspectives to look at because of the different cultures of the team.

Teams are a group of people striving for a common goal. They bring more views, skills and abilities to projects than a single individual. The goal of most teams is to become a high performance team. Once they complete the four stages mentioned earlier they can become a high performance team. Companies must consider business and ethical issues before they decide that participating globally globalization benefits their business. Globalization can have positive and negative effects on a company. Globalization also affects team dynamics in a positive and negative way. Short-term projects are affected negatively and long-term projects can benefit from cultural diverse teams. An efficient company will be aware of all the things mentioned before deciding to use teams and moving into the global market place.