The Benefits and Limitations of Teamwork…

When individuals form a team, the group gets credit for all the work, whether everyone contributed equally or not. This creates a sense of resentment and a feeling that a few team members contribute the vast majority of work while the rest make a minimal effort. This puts high achievers at a disadvantage because they are equally recognized with their lesser-performing peers.

When a team becomes too unified, members become reluctant to argue or debate their points. This hampers progress and threatens critical analysis and the creative process.
When you bring together a group of co-workers, the ones with the strongest personalities might overrule the others.

Communication among team members often is difficult. This might be especially true of teams that have not had much experience working together in the past. Assigned tasks, overall goals and feedback can be misinterpreted, meaning that intended messages are lost and the outcome of the team's work becomes something very different from what had been planned.

While bringing together people from a variety of departments and viewpoints can help foster a sense of unity in an organization, it can also lead to substantial team conflict that can damage morale and derail the team's success toward achieving its assigned task.

Some employees may simply not carry their weight in the group, forcing other team members to either pick up the slack or risk falling behind schedule.

Many organizations use teams because they hope that a group of five people will be able to work more efficiently than five individuals working separately. By sharing tasks and capitalizing on the different strengths of various individuals, teams can often accomplish a great deal of work in a relatively short period of time.

Synergy is a process in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Synergy is a central factor of effective teamwork. The combined efforts of a team that works well together accomplish more than the total efforts of all the members would have accomplished if they were each working alone.

Teamwork and cooperation greatly increase the efficiency of an organization. If employees are working separately and unaware of each other's activities, they could be unwittingly duplicating their efforts to no great advantage. By delegating tasks based on abilities and having each member of a team focus on accomplishing certain aspects of a project, a cooperative team can achieve goals using far less time and energy.

Communication skills are critical to the success of any group endeavour. When co-workers share information, it helps them all to remain aware of who is doing what and of where they stand in relation to their final goal. Cooperation and teamwork facilitate communication by fostering an atmosphere of mutual support in which each member of the team feels supported by the others.

Some personalities enjoy working alone, while others prefer to be part of a team. For people in the latter category, cooperating as part of a team provides an important sense of support and morale in the process of completing a job. Working alone or, worse, competing with others in a negative way, drains people's motivation to complete a task.