Analysis Of Team Cohesion

Teams come in many forms, whether it be in sports, in the workplace, or in educational settings, and these teams all must work together towards common goals. How well a team works together determines their success and part of working well together is to be cohesive. Team cohesion is defined as “the degree to which members are motivated to stay in the group (Spink, 2016). According to Yarmey, team cohesion has two meanings; first, it is the level of integration among team members in working towards a common goal, known as task cohesion, and second, the amount of integration that fulfills social-emotional satisfaction, known as social cohesion (2013). There are many videos available on the topic of team cohesion, both educational based and fiction

Scenes from this film exemplify many concepts for building and maintaining a cohesive team.

When attempting to bring the team together, the coach of the team in the film uses a team building program to bring the group together and unify them. Team building is defined by Spink as “programs that use group dynamic principles to increase cohesiveness, which enables the group to function more effectively,” (2016). The coach in the took the team away from their normal practice area and isolated them as a team, running through drills and creating a level playing field between the members, so that every member was operating under the same assumptions about how the team would function. The creation of group norms was reflected under the leadership of the team captain whom was biased towards the clack players. This attitude was transferred to the rest of the white team members, who then discriminated against the black individuals. This caused a break down in the team, each remember only thinking about themselves. Part of building a cohesive team is developing a ‘we’ mentality and team environment that reflects togetherness (Bloom, Loughead, & Newin, 2009). Making this shift to togetherness, regardless of skin colour helped to bring the team members closer together and operate as a more cohesive team. An important message from the scenes from ‘Remember the Titans’ was that if the team

When the team is more cohesive and can work together to achieve their goals they are more successful (Yarmey, 2013), which was shown in ‘Remember the Titans’ when the team was successful in the end after they had all come together, players and coaches alike. The scene from ‘Any Given Sunday’ illustrated the effects of leadership on a team and what is involved in motivating a team to work together. Team cohesion is established by both the team members and their leadership by creating a group culture and setting a group goal to work towards together, described by Gerald Pauschmann and illustrated in the scenes from ‘Any Given Sunday’ in Al Pacino’s speech and in the scenes from ‘Remember the