Challenges of Leadership and Teamwork

In this essay analyse and discuss the three areas, Teamwork evaluation, leadership evaluation and motivation evaluation. I will assess and evaluate how me, and my team performed and what processes we went through and what challenges we may have faced when working together in a team.

Teamwork forms the crucial element of any business or organisation or team. The better the teamwork the more the successful the organisation or group will be. As an individual if you are a team player and you know how to work well within a team you are most likely to achieve success in the majority of things you do in life.

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What is team work and the importance of it?

team work is the skill of collaborating with other in a effective way. These other people are the people that will work with you in your team, in your organization in your school, in your college. It Is how you collaborate and work with them, emotionally and intellectually connect with them. In an organization you have team, and every member has a different type of role, and when you take all these roles that people have and combine them together, this will create and achieve the goals of the organization, therefore without a team a business or organisation cannot be successful. (wehbe 2017)

Many people have different types of working styles for example, we have people in a group that may like to interact more and we have people in a group that like to interact less, this is why you have to understand the working style of the group is and the interpret and adapt to these making sure that you work well together. (wehbe 2017)

Teamwork evaluation

There are many different theories and models for teamwork, the one I will be discussing in this case is Bruce Tuckman’s theory of team life cycle 1965. This theory shows how team dynamics work and how things are from the beginning till end of a project. As for this specific theory there are five different stages of team and the first stage is forming. Forming is when you form the team, the forming phase happens when team members first meet and come together as a team. (Elsey, 2014) Storming is the second stage, in the course of storming, people try to understand each other, in this stage what tends to happen is that group members may start to have disagreements with each other which may start to cause conflict, teams realise that teamwork is more harder than they expected.

After you have formed the team, and then had disagreements in the storming stage, the next stage is norming, this phase is when people start working as a team. Usually in the norming stage rules are made, and people know how to act and behave, the team moves above the storming stage and finally begin to function as team, once that stage is complete, the next stage would be performing.

this is the stage when most of the work is done, now the team works and cooperates as a single team to achieve the aim and objective. In performing stage, the team Is functioning at their all-time best and giving a very high performance. (Elsey, 2014) Once the team have finally completed and achieved their main objective, the last stage would be Adjourning. Adjourning is when the breaking up of the team occurs, this is because the task is complete, and the team have successfully achieved their common goal. (Elsey, 2014)

Using Tuckman’s theory model to analyse my group, when me and my team first got together, we were all getting to know each other and form as a group. For many people such as myself, getting to know what people are like when working together can be struggle this because everyone is different, some people are very introverted and other individuals very extroverted. Moving forward, to get everyone involved in the group we all decided to get to know each other properly by doing some icebreakers and introduce ourselves and see what kind of personalities we have in our group, this went well. In my group I was nominated to be a team leader first. This role was good for me because I am a leader by nature, I enjoy leading a group and telling others what needs to be done. Unfortunately, in our team there was conflict, as expected, the reason this conflict occurred was because of a group activity we did together as a group when we had to identify a book, website or journal and then citate together the right way. With me being quite aggressive and strict, I wanted it to be done my way, which caused arguments in our team and most members were not happy. When this happened, I knew I had to re adjust and myself to avoid any more conflict which was the most challenging part, so I decided to include my team mates opinions in our group activities as we have to do it as a group and come to mutual decision and conclusion instead of me choosing what I felt like. As a group we were able to resolve this issue quickly and put it past us.

In terms of implication for challenges faced within the business environment for team work, it is important to work in a team when you have to, for example when Nando’s work together they need the receptionists to communicate with the kitchen workers to be able to prepare the food for its customers so it is delivered to them on time.

Leadership evaluation

Laissez - Faire leadership is a distinctive type of leadership that is very hands off, the idea of a leader directly giving their employees or team workers a task and then anticipating for the best results. Laissez – faire leadership in simple terms means do what you want if the job is done right. (cherry, K 2019).

Laissez – faire leadership is a very old style of leadership and it’s a concept that came around in the 1930’s by a man named Kurt Lewin who first came up with the idea. He identified this as the style of leadership that have need the least amount of effort but also the most oversight. Leading laissez – faire leadership can have lots of negatives and positives. (Cherry, K 2019.) One of biggest disadvantages of laissez – faire leadership style is the intention that productivity is not going to be very good, this is because employees that are unsupervised are not going to really work as hard and also may possibly do as little as possible because they have realised the are not going to be checked in on or prove what work they have done. Another disadvantage of laissez – faire in the sense of team work or employees is that they may be lost and confused on exactly what their task is for example a manager or supervisor may give a employee an assigned task, but if they are not available to around to give feedback, the individual will feel confused on the project and the outcome of the project could be less then what was expected as employees and individuals need that direction. Laissez – faire leadership can very advantageous If you have employees that are highly skilled and may not need that constant guidance and supervision whenever they are working. Another advantage would also be greater job satisfaction between employees.

Reflecting, in most of my group works activity, as a group we had to decide and pick a team leader each week. After we had nominated the leader for the week, we did various types of group activities as a group we all had an aim and an objective to reach. For example, one of our group activities we all had to research and find out information of Maslow’s hierarchy theory from either a book or online. The group activity went well as we all worked in a team, the leader was very laid back and let everyone do what they wanted if the job got done. Looking at what went wrong, I had realised in this group activity there was lots of group members not putting enough input and helping, they felt like they didn’t have to do as much because other people will do it. As a leader it is very much important to be able to delegate specific tasks to individual so everyone has done their part otherwise some will do more than others which is unfair, working in a group should mean that everyone does an equal amount of work, so therefore that is what I feel that could have gone differently.

Motivation evaluation

Herzberg theory which is also known as two factor theory is proposed by Fredrick Herzberg in 1959, Herzberg was a behavioural scientist, and according to his theory there are some job factors that event in satisfaction and that is motivational factors and there some other factors that avoid dissatisfaction and that is hygiene factors. This theory features Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Herzberg’s view of satisfaction and dissatisfaction are based on motivational and hygiene factors for example everything from physiological, safety, and love/belonging are hygiene factors, and everything from esteem needs and self-actualization is essentially motivational factors.

The examples of hygiene factors are including things such as pay, job security social needs, physical work environment and compensation. For job security and example would be when a worker has a job with a permanent position then a person with sabbatical contract. For social needs an example would be relationship you have with your colleagues, having good relationships and being able to interact well with them. For physical work environment, an example could be things provided in the workplace such as office equipment, toilets provided in good condition. For compensation a good example would be bonuses, increased salary to compensate their hard work. If these factors are missing it could lead to dissatisfaction and not motivation.

Motivational factors are things that affect us and motivate individuals to work better and harder. Motivation factors revolve around the job itself such as responsibilities, recognition, promotion, growth, and achievement.

Herzberg’s different pros and cons and in some cases, it is good to use in other cases it not so good. A good advantage about this theory is that it looks at internal factors and employees instead of external factors. A disadvantage of this theory is that is can be biased, satisfaction can mean different things to certain individuals, some people might want more flexible hours, others may want more power and authority or higher salary.

Looking back at my team’s performance I think as a group we motivated each other when doing most tasks, we include everyone in, therefore there was no type of alienation, which means nobody really felt left out. We did a group activity which was a quiz against other teams and see who gains the most points, my group was very competitive which was crucial in order to do well. My group had to most points in the group quiz against other teams, us winning motivated us even more which made us stronger as a team to carry on doing well in further activities. Another good thing was that the leader for that week treated us for our hard work, and that is important in any business environment, when you work hard you should be award and shown appreciation and feel valued.

To finalize and wrap up this essay, there are a few insights I developed for teamwork, leadership and motivation evaluation. In terms of teamwork, as a group you will go over numerous stages before you can work as a group to complete a project. Teamwork is essential in any type of business environment to ensure things get done effectively. In terms of leadership, the type of leader you are will effective the team as whole a good leader will affect the team positively whereas a bad leader will affect a team negatively. In terms of motivation, motivation contributes massively to a team’s success willingness to work harder. The more you motivate your team and give them rewards and praises, the harder they work to the best of their ability.