by Raymond Lim

Created on: October 07, 2008

Team dynamics in the workplace is one of the vital ingredients necessary for growth and progress. Teams are formed or brought together in an organization to achieve specific organizational objectives.

In an organization team dynamics often acts as a synergy for organizational members to input their ideas and creativity to further improve and innovate themselves in their work. Without it very little can be achieved by individual effort and initiative alone.

Many of us have personally found ourselves being influenced by the behaviors, opinions and expectations of other people at the workplace. These influences can either be formal or informal.

According to Arnold, Cooper and Robertson,

A person's behavior is influenced most fundamentally by social interactions which can determine their sense of identity and belonging at work. People seek meaningful social relationships at work. They are responsive to the expectations of people around them often more so than financial incentives.'

Most decision makers operate within social organizations where they rely on or are influenced by other people in some way during the making of decisions and resolution of problems. Two forms of social influence on decision makers are:

i) Informational social influence; when faced with situations with insufficient information to make a decision and had to look to others to provide them with that information, either directly or observing what others do in similar scenarios. Informational social influence therefore has to do with filling the gaps' in their understanding of problem situations, where seeking the opinions or observing what others do can be an influential source of their decision behavior.

ii) Normative social influence where he had enough information to make his decision but had to conform to the expectations of other people in their work or social situation.

The encouragement of team working has been adopted as a key strategy for building flexible and adaptive organizations which can cope well with turbulence in business environment; which provides the kind of flexibility and innovative behavior which is required.

As per Kanter, team working provide integrative thinking that actively embraces change is more likely in companies whose cultures and structures are also integrative. Such organizations reduce rancorous conflict and isolation between organizational units; create mechanisms for exchange of information and new ideas across organizational boundaries; ensure that multiple perspectives

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