Self selected groups or teams which gravitate together often have a shared vision and benefit from a history of success in other ventures. This provides a tremendous head start over groups which have been arbitrarily thrown together as well as many carefully "designed" teams.
The most significant variables are mutual respect or the lack of it, and a preoccupation with getting credit for ones self, or conversely, a concern that someone else will get the glory that they deserve. The successful team enjoys working together and understands that by collaborating they help to inspire and propel each other forward, while the group which is made up of individually competitive members believes that there can only be one winner and that helping another actually reduces their chances of success. Often they see a cooperative or collaborative nature in another as something to be taken advantage of.
do you see the present economy change the interactions of teams? might the fact that many individuals feeling fragile, with respect to their position, change the interactions of teams? selfpreservation over teamplay?
ReplyDeleteI believe that the current economic crisis probably has changed both the thinking and the behavior of those within most teams, but it has also had an effect on a much larger societal scale. When threatened, we often pull back into an US/THEM posture where we watch out for ourselves, our families or nations before anything else and sometimes show little or no regard for "outsiders." When the pressure is on, some can become cowardly, in one way or another stabbing someone else in the back without warning or actual provocation, while others under exactly the same circumstances rise to the occasion and behave in a heroic manner, at times risking their own well being to help someone else.
ReplyDeleteFor the most part, however, in matters of survival, our actions are pretty predictable.
For some of course, the US/Them orientation is an every day occurrence. Stress tends to intensify this already exiting tendency :-(
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