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High Performance Teams

How a Group Can Become a High Performance Team
Teams are crucial to making companies more flexible, quality-conscious, and competitive. Organizations need to ensure that they are using an organizational structure that matches today's demanding business environment. But what is a team and what is a team's function and how does a team become a high functioning team? This paper will answer those questions along with examining the impact of cultural diversity on a group. Also the paper will describe how cultural diversity contributes or detract from a high-performance team.
Many organizations have working groups that call themselves teams. A team is a group of people coming together to collaborate (Clark). A team is a group of people with a high degree of interdependence geared towards the achievement of a common goal or completion of a task. But their work is produced by a combination of individual contributions. Teams produce work that is based on collective effort. Team members are deeply committed to each other's personal growth and success. Team members not just cooperate in all facets of their tasks and goals; they share in what are customarily thought of as management functions, such as planning, organizing, setting performance goals, assessing the team's performance, developing their own strategies to manage change, and securing their own resources (Clark). A team outperforms a group and outperforms all reasonable expectations given to its individual members (Clark).
Teams go through developmental stages. The most commonly used framework is Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing, that was developed in the mid-1960s by Bruce W. Tuckman. Each stage of team development has its own identifiable feelings and behaviors; understanding why things are happening in particular ways on your team can be a significant part of the self-evaluation process. Having a method to recognize and understand causes for changes in the team...