It is important to note that the modern business environment requires extensive collaborative efforts between a wide range of independent parties. The latter groups might include mentors, mentees, assistants, managers, employees, leaders, collaborators, participants, facilitators, or partners. In order to ensure and achieve a sufficient level of team cooperation, cohesiveness, and unity, the most critical qualities include trust, ownership, creativity, risk tolerance, effective conflict management, competence, open communication, and inclusiveness.
The process of teamwork is a complex one, which requires a multitude of skills, qualities, and capabilities. A study suggests that there are five core factors that determine the degree and quality of a team (Tripathy, 2018). The findings show that healthy risk-taking, ownership, conflict management, trust, and creativity are tightly intertwined with good teamwork (Tripathy, 2018). In other words, each team member needs to be responsible, collected, innovative, trustworthy, and risk-tolerant to a certain extent. Another study showed that “contributing to the team’s work, interacting with teammates, keeping the team on track, expecting quality, and having relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities” were highly associated with greater performance (Hwang, 2018, p. 157). Thus, these attributes have some overlapping points with the previous observations but additionally include individual team members’ competence levels. Insightful research conducted within the context of the pandemic revealed that leader inclusiveness and communication were vital for team cooperation (Mayo, 2020). The findings were identified under the pressure of the lockdowns, which means that they would be even more applicable in a more conventional workplace environment.
Moreover, the multitude of qualities needed for good teamwork is reflected in the diversity of roles involved. For example, a leader is likely to have a higher impact on setting inclusiveness and open communication within a team, but managers, as well as facilitators, are better primed for setting clear expectations to ensure ownership. Similarly, competency and creativity are determined the most by employees, mentees, and assistants, whereas trust is critical with participants and collaborators. Each specific team will operate in a unique environment, context, and under certain conditions, which will dictate whether or not some qualities are needed more than others (Hwang, 2018). For instance, trust is critical when a team is comprised of representatives of different departments or organizations, but competence is essential during more technical and complex endeavors, such as sophisticated engineering projects.
Both managers and leaders need to be able to deal with conflict within a team. The common obstacles to productive teamwork are conflicts, poor decision-making, communication barriers, the lack of clear objectives, and ineffective leadership. A proper team needs to have a clear goal to work towards under an appropriate leader, where ideas and information are shared openly (Mayo, 2020). In addition, it is important to have a structured decision-making process with plausible conflict resolution mechanisms to ensure a smooth progression in accordance with a plan.
In conclusion, the most important qualities of good teamwork include trust, ownership, creativity, risk tolerance, effective conflict management, competence, open communication, and inclusiveness. Teamwork is a critical part of any organizational structure and determines the effectiveness of its processes since these units are mainly tasked with specific and precision-based tasks. On the basis of the acquired knowledge, it can be stated that team effectiveness is tied to its organizational environment, team structure, team processes, diversity, leadership, behavioral patterns, cooperation, internal support, compelling direction, and open communication. Teams operate outstandingly if all these elements are present to a sufficient extent meaning that some variations are possible depending on the difficulty of the goal and resource availability.
References
Hwang, M. I. (2018). Relationship between teamwork and team performance: Experiences from an ERPsim competition. Journal of Information Systems Education, 29(3), 157-168.
Mayo, A. T. (2020). Teamwork in a pandemic: Insights from management research. BMJ Leader, 4(2), 1-4.
Tripathy, M. (2018). Building quality teamwork to achieve excellence in business organizations. International Research Journal of Management, IT & Social Sciences, 5(3), 1-7.