Characteristics Of Functional Teams

Lesson 5: Teams and Leadership

A team that I have participated in is a team made up of people from different departments and its function was to improve the delivery of services to customers. The organization’s main activity was selling retail products and in order to increase sales, a team was created to improve service delivery to customers to encourage more purchases.

1. Type of Team

The type of team is defined by its composition and function. The following are the features of different types of teams:

• Functional team – These are made up of people from the same department or office but with different roles. Some functional teams can be made up of people from different department that work together to develop a product or implement a new

Team members’ characteristics

Team members are different in terms of characteristics including skills or expertise and functional experience. Expertise refers to technical knowhow or knowledge in different areas that allow them to effectively perform their different roles. For example, a sales and marketing professional brings in expertise or knowledge on how to manage products and market them. This team member can be in charge of all marketing tasks because he or she has the knowledge and skills from school and training.

Functional experience refers to the practice and on-job skills that a person learns from his or her expertise. The work setting provides people with real life situations where they can apply their knowledge, skills and personal judgment to perform their tasks. A person with functional experience can perform various tasks that are not learnt in schools because he or she has previously handled the same tasks at work. For example, in the team setting, a sales and marketing profession gets additional skills in marketing after doing the marketing role for a period of time. The new skills might include making decisions on when and how to market a product as well as come up with a new marketing slogan for a

In the team setting, leadership affects employee participation as it is the team leaders who provide guidance and the pace of performing tasks. If leadership behavior is open, employees are encouraged to think independently and actively participate in initiating change. In contrast, closed leadership discourages employee participation by setting guidelines and monitoring employee behavior (Zacher & Rosing, 2015). My team was lucky enough to have an open team leader who encouraged other team members to think independently. For example, members had the freedom to approach the team leader with new ideas. Besides, members were allowed to make decisions based on their personal judgment when