Week 13 Post 1: Teams

Yesterday in class, Shayna and Logan presented on the topic of Teams. They did a great job teaching the content of the subject to the class, and I believe it was a good subject to wrap up the third section of the class because it touched upon many of the other topics we already discussed. I also thought it was a good topic to discuss because working in teams is a major part of what we will be doing once we get into the workforce, as well as this summer during our internships. The main function of teams in an organizational setting is to combine resources, skills, and ideas in order to achieve a certain goal or objective for the organization. Teams are used because it is believed that by working together with other employees more work will be produced, compared to if the individual members worked by themselves. However as many people know this is in fact not always the case. There is always one or two individuals on a team who do not do their fair share of the work and rely on the other members of the team to pick up there slack. Unfortunately it usually works for the slacker because the other members of the team don’t want to get a bad grade or fail at accomplishing a task, so they do the slackers share of the work. This is why it is important to have group performance evaluations at the end of a group project or task. These evaluations allow you to evaluate the performance of all members of the group, and this is a good time to expose the slacker of the group to the boss or upper management.