eight ways to build collaborative teams
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Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams 1
Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams
Dana Obeid
Organizational Behavior
Professor Nikki Lebo
March 29, 2015
Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams 2
Article Summary
The article focuses on how to build successful collaborative larger teams that links to
success of an organization. Executing complex initiatives like acquisitions, merger or an IT
overhaul requires a span of knowledge that can be provided only by teams that are large, diverse,
virtual, and composed of highly qualified team members. While the very same characteristics
becomes a problem in collaborative teams, the authors of this article focuses on what can an
organization, executives and team members do to build a successful team. This article shows the
research done by professors that studied 55 large teams and identified those with strong
collaboration despite their complexity. The main agenda was to examine the team dynamics and
environment at various firms in all kind of industries ranging from financial firms, media
companies, an oil and Gas Company, telecommunication firms, and a hospitality firm. The
authors came out with eight success factors that are: signature relationship practices, role models
of collaboration among executives, the establishment of a gift culture in which managers support
employees by mentoring, training in relationship skills, sense of community, ambidextrous
leadership skills or leaders who are both task-oriented and relationship-oriented, good use of
heritage relationships as well as role clarity and task ambiguity. In most of the companies, teams
are growing larger and companies constantly thrive to change their team practices due to
economic down turns, virtual teams, diversity and globalization. The new complexity of teams
requires organizations to increase their capacity for collaboration, by making long-term
investments that build relationships and trust and smart near-term decisions about how teams are
formed and run.
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Critical Thinking
The reasons for lack of collaboration were mainly due to time difference, communication
gaps, organizational culture and the age. After reading this article, I think some of the steps can
truly overcome the problem of team collaboration. I feel some of very powerful factors that lead
to success in building of collaborative team that concerns with the leader or a manager are
building relationships, fostering communication, modeling collaborative behavior, and
demonstrating the skills that are both task as well as relationship oriented among the team
members. While some of the factors for building successful collaborative teams that team
members should focus on are building trust for their leader, maintaining relationships, and
understanding the role as well as the tasks complexity of individual in the team. Above all to
build the successful collaborative teams, an organization should have support from top tier
executives and the strategic human resource management that aligns the goals of an organization
to individual’s goal which are in-turn tied to performance management systems.
I completely agree with the authors about the required leadership traits and skills for
managing the larger teams. I feel the team leaders of fairly large teams should have conflict
management skills, skills for creating the perception of fairness among team members, and skills
for building and maintaining relationships with and among team members.
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References
Eight ways to build collaborative teams. (n.d.). Retrieved March 29, 2015, from
Harvard Business Review website: https://hbr.org/2007/11/
eight-ways-to-build-collaborative-teams/