Teamwork in Today\'s Workplace, Working

¶ … Teamwork

In today's workplace, working independently is no longer the trend. The emergence of technology brought great number of job opportunities and projects that can provide more convenience to man's work. Thus, the need for task completion these days usually requires collaboration of ideas and information from a group of individuals to provide better output of products and services. Hence, teamwork these days is being pushed by many organizations to make this goal possible as well as to allow quick delivery of this goal.

Teamwork has many aspects that make it an effective strategy in project development. This paper will try to discuss the following one important phase of teamwork that the researcher finds to be necessary and crucial - Synergy.

Synergy

The saying "two heads are better than one" is a valuable factor that is necessary to teamwork. One of the main objectives why teamwork is being formed is to allow the availability of more ideas and resources from team members for an excellent project output. However, the knowledge and skills of every member will be useless if a team does not have the ability to work on each member's contribution and assemble them into one great idea, plan, or objective. In this view, synergy can help in the process of multiplying knowledge and information into a viable resource for a team.

Synergy occurs when a team practices the recognition of the value of every input gathered from every member. Because team members may have different perspective on problems and goals faced by a team, it is in the synergy strategy where a team can produce better results because it allows them to see diverse views that an individual who works alone in a project may not have seen. Allyn Bradford indicates the following example on how synergy works in a teamwork.

Kevin Kelly points out how a single honeybee can do nothing by itself. But in the hive it becomes part of a highly productive operation to make honey. There occurs in this process, Kelly says, "a hive mind" consisting of many individual bees working together collectively.

In some project teams, lack of synergy can cause problems such as wrong project output and incompetent project result. This occurs when there are gaps between the ideas applied by team members in the tasks assigned to them that do not correspond and agree with other member's tasks that may have relation to their own task. In lack of synergy, the main objectives and goals of a team usually ends distorted due to inability to communicate ideas, thus preventing a team to decide and set one main goal.

Synergy itself is basically teamwork. If teamwork needs the cooperation and support from every team member to become effective, the same goes for synergy. Every member must provide enough support in bringing in his contribution for the team's goal. By doing so, gaps and assumptions between the objectives of tasks performed by every team member can be prevented. Moreover, with synergy, the possibility that undiscovered idea and information can be discovered.