Five stages of team development and organizational culture

¶ … Organizational Culture

There are five stages of team development. These stages include orientation, conflict, structure, work and dissolution. Each stage is critical to the overall development of a team. This development occurs over time.

Orientation is the first stage, and is that which occurs when team members are first getting together with one another. Orientation is required to inform everyone of a team's goals and some of the different ways that the team will go about achieving them. Basic roles are identified, such as leaders. During orientation people get to know one another and their jobs.

The conflict stage is when team members get to react to the information they learned during orientation. For example, certain team members may not agree with one another or with the positions that they are filling within a team. This stage is typically filled with tension and disagreements.

During the structure stage, the team is able to coalesce. Individuals get more comfortable with their roles and the way they interact with one another. An example of this stage is increased communication between team members, who know one another and how to talk to each other better through working with each other over time.

During the work stage team members become adept at working with one another. They hone in on specific goals and may even achieve them. An example of the work stage is sales team members collaborating with one another to fulfill end of the month sales objectives in the automotive industry.

The final stage is dissolution. Teams dissolve when they have accomplished their goals. At this point their roles change, and people go their own ways. A good example of this stage is during the offseason after a sports team wins a championship, and players are traded to other teams.

Both climate and culture play very important roles in organizations. Although these terms are similar, they actually refer to two different things. Climate is focused on context, and on the specific context in which actions take place. Climax is more about relationships between things, and about how people interact with each other. On the other hand, company culture is more about the meaning of certain actions, and the way that they are interpreted. Company culture is based on an organization's values. Climate is more about the environment in which people work and how they are able to relate to each other.

Company culture affects the way that people do things in a company. The best example of this fact is provided by Enron, which admittedly had an aggressive company culture. At the end of certain amount of time, the employees that produced the least in Enron were getting fired. Therefore, people tended to do things aggressively to not be in that bottom percentage. Viewed from this perspective, a company culture and its values impacts organizations by helping to set the tone by which they work, as well as how they act.

The climate of an organization impacts the way that people interact with each other. Some climates can be laid back. For instance, during the dotcom boom it was not uncommon to have million dollar companies in which people could go to work in sandals, pajamas, eat breakfast at their computers, etc. Even though these people might have been engaged in very strenuous work, the climate in which they worked was mellow and laidback. The climate impacts an organization by setting the tone by which it operates on a day-to-day basis. Some climates are laidback, others are more hostile and stressful in which to work.

There are actually five emerging commonalities among organizational intervention. Each of these is important in different ways. The first emerging commonality among organizational interventions is the fact that they are strategic. This fact is important because it is distinct from tactical. Tactics are used by organizations to achieve strategies. The fact that interventions are strategic implies that they are long-term plans orchestrated from the top of organizations.

The second commonality among organizational interventions to emerge is the fact that these are team centered. This particular commonality indicates that these interventions are holistic, and deal with the organization in its entirety as opposed to dealing with just a few departments. Team centered approaches are fairly popular among businesses right now, so it makes sense that interventions for them utilize this approach as well.