There are thousands of projects going on in the world and majority of these are being executed by teams. When working in a team there are chances for conflicts among the team members. There can be many reasons for conflicts. The article discusses the reasons for conflicting situations, conflicts and techniques to resolve conflicts and different types of teams and team development stages.
A team can be homogeneous or heterogeneous. In homogeneous teams members are from similar background, viz., skills, education, age and experience. In heterogeneous teams, which are refereed to as cross-functional teams in the corporate terminology, members with different educational background, age and experience work together towards a common goal. For example, members from Marketing, Production, Human Resources and Finance form a cross functional team.
In product development environment, we see cross-functional teams working together to develop and launch the product into the global markets. Usually the team formation differs based on the industry, product or service. In some kinds of teams, members with same educational background form the team. For example, a Bank or a financial institution will have majority of team members with finance as educational background. Some companies in software industry will have only graduates in computer science as the members of their product development teams. Based on the product or the service the team composition is defined. In some cases, the expert committee of the government consists of the people with diversified background. Now let us see the different stages of team development. |
