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Submitted by tubaught on December 2, 2005
Category: Business
Words: 1203 | Pages: 5
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Groups and Teams: Becoming High Performers
A team is a small group of people with complementary skills who work actively together to achieve a common purpose for which they hold themselves collectively accountable (Schermerhorn, J.). A major challenge in any organization is to turn the group into a high-performance team that can function well in any setting. High-performance teams have special characteristics that allow them to excel at teamwork and achieve special performance advantages (Schermerhorn, J.). This paper will discuss how groups can become high-performance teams and how demographic characteristics, cultural diversity, and group behavior affects or contributes to this goal.
Demographic Characteristics
Demographic characteristics usually consist of age, sex, race, education level, and work experience. According to research, these characteristics can be classified into two groups, visibility and job relatedness or informational. Visible demographic characteristic refer to age, sex, and race. Informational demographic characteristics refer to differences in education levels, and work experience (Jhen, K., 2000). The distinction between these two groups is important because visible characteristics may not be as relevant to a given task, but they shape individuals, perceptions, and behaviors.
People often use visible characteristics to categorize others, which can cause hostility, anxiety, and stereotyping. The initial perceptions made by team members can often signal the quality and type of future relationships amongst the group. Therefore, visible characteristics are more likely to create conflict than informational characteristics. This occurs when visible attributes draws attention to features of an individual that may be irrelevant to the task at hand (Jhen, K., 2000). On the other hand, attributes such as education level and work experience often show how one thinks and understands tasks. Informational...
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