Successful teamwork is usually grounded on a common goal which to achieve all members of a team contribute to their best ability. The combining of diverse strengths and negotiating of different ideas can help to resolve a task faster and better. Furthermore, successful teamwork can be a gratifying experience for the members of the team. But it can also be a frustrating experience if no consensus can be found regarding the goal, communication is not working or conflicts cannot be resolved. To avoid any of these (and other) negative effects impeding successful teamwork, the ‘big 5’ of teamwork are usually suggested (Salas et al., 2005):
Much has been said already about a team work experience in block 1 of H817. Without assigning roles and responsibilities to individual team members, the exercise was successful in producing – in time – a comprehensive report about the potential use of screencasting for student feedback. Although some team members took a very active role in coordinating activities, there was no explicit team leadership in place, nor was there any mutual performance monitoring. In my personal learning journal I noted that instead there was a lot of back-up behaviour, adaptability and team orientation. These elements were so strong that they made leadership and monitoring obsolete.
Because I personally had difficulties keeping up with all the conversation going on, I noted the following:
- Make sure all communication channels used are clear to all team members
- Assign at least one role: the communication coordinator
I think I was not the only one to suggest these measures to ensure or improve teamwork efficiency and I am sure they are even more important when working together over a longer period of time.
In our current group for block 3 we have also discussed how to allocate the proposed roles for the Learning Design Studio project. For the moment we agreed to start off without role assignments but try to work with individual task ownerships. We hope that this way we will be more flexible, which might be important when not all team members are available at the same degree throughout the entire project.
References
Kay, J., Maisonneuve, N., Yacef, K. and Reimann, P. (2006) ‘The big five and visualisations of team work activity’ in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Berlin/Heidelberg, Springer, pp. 197–206.
Salas, E., Sims, D. and Burke, C. (2005) ‘Is there a “Big Five” in teamwork?’, Small Group Research, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 555–99.