Team Communication Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Team Communication - Essay Example However, many people involved into this type of interpersonal relations are not fully aware about the rules and logic of team communication. This knowledge is especially important for those who supervise and direct work of teams, namely managers and coordinators. These people spend most of their working hours communicating with their subordinates: participation in planning, organizing, controlling, and supervising activities, preventing and resolving conflicts between the personnel, scheduling and many other tasks that define the nature of team work. Communication between people is a very complex process that includes several equally important aspects. Defining it as a process we mean that it is not static set of behaviors or object we can hold in hands. As David Berlo (1960), the famous expert in team communication, believes, "if we accept the concept of process, we view events and relationship as dynamic, ongoing ever-changing, continuous. When we label something as a process, we also mean that it does not have a beginning, an end, a fixed sequence of events. It is not static, at rest. It is moving. The ingredients within a process interact; each affects all of the others" (p.6). Team or group communication includes "a relatively small number of persons who have a mutually interdependent purpose and a sense of belonging, demonstrate behavior based on norms and values, use procedures accepted by the group, and interact orally" (Pearson, 1994, p.211). This definition mirrors the structure of team communication. Social psychologists long ago identified certain circumstances under which group communication is more appropriate than any other: 1. When a variety of entirely different ideas is better than several ideas that have much in common. Presence of others involved into similar activity encourages the process of thinking in each individual member of the group making them generate new ideas. 2. When members of the group express a strong desire to be involved into the process of decision making and discussing problems. In such situation, group communication helps avoid tension that would have inevitably appeared in case the group's members are denied such opportunity. 3. Team communication plays the key role when commitment of its members is at stake. It is a common knowledge that decisions put into place without agreement of people whom they concern have good chances to meet unexpected resistance. For instance, if a manger determines his subordinates' duty list without discussing it with them, there is a great probability that majority of the subordinates will express strong resistance. 4. And sometimes when a group decision is an essential condition it is appropriate not to ask the members privately, but to let them discuss the problem in group and made a common decision (Pearson, 1994, pp.211-214). Presence of others dramatically transforms behavior of separate individuals as well as their way of thinking. In order to understand the reasons for these changes we should analyze the unique characteristics of small groups, and first of all group norms, roles, leadership, member satisfaction, commitment, and productivity. Norms is a distinctive characteristic of groups. Basically, norm is "an expected standard of behaviour and belief established and enforced by a group" (Franzoi, 1996, p.261). The word "standard" includes