Team Building in Organizations: Benefit and Challenge - A Review

Abstract

Team building has today become a key business strategy been utilized by organizations to develop employees competencies, workplace experience, and a cohesive productive workforce that has the capacity to help organizations provide solutions to their numerous challenges. This paper examines the concept of teambuilding, and explored literature to discover whether teambuilding contributes to organizations positive outcomes that promotes productivity, enhanced performance, and competitive advantage. The paper observed that organizations are embracing teambuilding to achieve high levels of both task performance and human resources maintenance, as well as to stimulate and promote better organizational productivity and innovativeness. The paper identifies encouragement of creativity and innovation, open communication, and increased collaborations as some benefits of teambuilding. It also identified lack of trust, lack of self-awareness, poor communication and working toward opposing goals as some major challenges confronting teambuilding activities. The paper concluded that teambuilding promotes increased collaborations, improve employees morale, encourage creativity and innovation in organizations, and also as an effective way of developing employee competencies to meet customers growing needs and changing expectations. It is recommended that organizations should provide teambuilding activities that fit them, and that help to bring team members together. Organizations should also provide right climate and essential resources needed by teams to carry out assigned tasks if the teams are to succeed. Organizations should set up a well define process that help them identify right people with requisite competencies who fit in to a team. Additionally, management should communicate the core values expected from the teams to them so that they will be rightfully guides on how they are to accomplish given tasks