Assignment 1: Academic Article Cross-Functional Team (CFT)

Academic Article Review
Your Name
February 9, 2017
Your Institution of Affiliation
In any organization (profit and non-profit) that have ever existed, it is inevitable for its employees to be divided into workgroups, divisions, departments, or simply ‘teams’. This division happens due to the fact that efficiency is most likely to be achieved when tasks are divided and sub-divided to different groups of people rather than having members without a definite function and works simply by being prompted what to do. These days however, the main dilemma is not to whether divide an organization into teams or not, rather the main problem lies in how these people would be divided (in structure and functions), so that every team and member could perform with its maximum efficiency. In line with this, the author of this paper would analyze the paper written by Daspit, et.al (2013), with regards to the effects of a team’s internal factors (cohesion and team environment) in what they called as a Cross-Functional Team (CFT) success.
In the article written by Daspit, et.al (2013), it is apparent that they have utilized the typology of teams, as divided into “functional” and “cross-functional” ones. Basically, functional teams are those which have a definite structure, that is characterized by heirarchical divisions that performs specific functions CITATION App11 \l 1033 (Appelo, 2011). In contrast to this, Cross-functional teams are composed of people who are involved in different departments and bears different types of expertise, but works to achieve the same goal CITATION App11 \l 1033 (Appelo, 2011). In Daspit, et.al’s (2013), work, they have employed undergraduate students from a large Southwestern university in the US, who are taking a capstone project in a business policy course that they are taking. More specifically, the sample size of the students amounted to 142 individuals who were divided into 24 teams. With regards to the functions that they were required to undertake, the teams were given manegerial problems that required a multitude of differe...