Importance and Measures of Teamwork, and Leader's Role in Promoting Effective Teams

Leadership and Building of Effective Teams
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Abstract
The essay seeks to enumerate the importance of teamwork, measures of teamwork, and the role played by the leader in promoting effective teams. It is established that the army is faced with challenging and evolving environments and this requires leaders to set-up and develop teams that create innovative ways of dealing with complex situations. To do so, the leader is required to establish identity, cohesiveness and a positive climate for a team to thrive. The paper highlights the importance of these aspects and how the leader can enhance them. Also, the paper appreciates the possibility of ineffective teams. It draws attention to behaviors that may contribute to ineffective teams and proposes that it is the onus of the team leader to initiate conflict resolution mechanisms.
Introduction
All organizations, including the army, depend on teams or groups to achieve set goals, objectives, carry out projects and complete tasks. High-performance teams are the go-to solution for the current competitive and globalized world. They assist in decoding complex tasks by applying team-oriented strategies (Druskat & Wolff, 2001). There are many benefits and advantages that come from working in teams. The most significant advantage is the sharing of knowledge and the diversity of it. Each team member comes with their own know-how and can contribute their tools and ideas for the betterment of team effort, or not. Also, teams build camaraderie. However, teams do take time and effort to build and require enabling conditions like a supportive context, a strong structure, and a compelling direction to achieve success (Haas & Mortensen, 2016).
Each member comes with his or her own personality. It is crucial that a team leader identifies the interpersonal dynamics at play so that they can apply an optimal arrangement of persons to promote high performance and success. Sometimes teams do flounder in failure even though they are provided with the necessary resources for success. It all comes down to how well the team members mesh together and focus on their goals. Consequently, this paper will try and evaluate teamwork in the context of the army. It will investigate the role of a leader in building effective teams. Additionally, it proposes that good teamwork is measured by cohesion, identity, and climate. The essay will also mention qualities associated with ineffective teams and how team leaders can nib these behaviors in the bud.
Measures of Good Teamwork and how Leaders Assist in Building Effective Teams
The three qualities of an effective team are cohesion, identity, and climate. Cohesion, as academic inquiries have put forth, is closely linked to military performance (MacCoun & Hix, 2010). To better understand the importance of cohesion and how it is affected by interpersonal dynamics it is classified into either task versus social cohesion or vertical versus horizontal cohesion (MacCoun & Hix, 2010). All in all, cohesion is the application of likability or emotional connection among group members, and the devotion of group members to a achieve a goal as this requires the participation of the entire team. Task and social cohesion b...