Team cooperation in any organization is always advantageous. It improves overall employee performance and organizational productivity. In a team, each employee is responsible for success. It is a combination of strengths, which can also lead to minimizing individual weaknesses. In this case, the strengths and weaknesses of team members can enhance and complement each other.
As a manager, you should be careful when selecting team members. You should look at a good range of abilities, expertise, and personality. This will help you develop a team of like-minded people who are ready to work together for a particular goal.
In team cooperation, energies and motivations are often added up and as result employees’ work hard together to achieve a common objective which is to realize the organizational vision, mission, and goals. The desire to do this also boosts efficiency and effectiveness in the organization.
Also, understand that only giving out a guideline regarding the work process is not enough. Your job as a manager is to make sure that each team member shares a common outlook at work.
Did you know that effective team cooperation can significantly boost productivity?
Google’s Project Aristotle identified that psychological safety is the most critical factor in successful teams. Teams with high psychological safety are more innovative and productive because members feel safe to take risks and express their ideas without fear of negative consequences (Source: Google re:Work, 2015).
Moreover, a study by the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory found that communication patterns are the most important predictor of a team’s success, even more so than individual intelligence (Source: MIT, 2012). This highlights the importance of fostering open and frequent communication to enhance team cooperation.
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Here are 5 Advantages of Team Cooperation
1) Reduces unproductive competition
Team cooperation encourages employees to work together for the benefit of the organization. It reduces the desire of employees to compete against each other, which often is never good for the business, and instead focus on working together to achieve a common goal.
When you foster teamwork in your organization, you will realize that employees fight less especially on issues that do not help the organization. Politicking also reduces as employees realize they are all valuable to the success of the organization.
All this means that your future as an organization has better prospects than when you are competing over individual self-interests. By itself, this can determine whether or not your organization survives, or prospers. A positive result for your firm makes everyone look good. Failure of the organization results in a black mark for everyone associated with it.
2) Enhances knowledge sharing
In a team, every member is encouraged to participate and contribute to the task at hand which results in compounded outputs. When employees work cooperatively, their efforts multiply, become stronger and better. In the process, the employees working together exchange ideas as each of them gain new perspective and knowledge on the tasks they are working on.
While individual workers can also do that, team cooperation is well-defined and can help employees expect help from their teammates.
Apart from participation and contribution, team cooperation allows employees to share knowledge and ideas. This makes it more likely that your organization will succeed.
Sharing knowledge results in learning opportunities for employees which would not be possible if each team member were looking out for their limited interests. In this way, all team members can benefit, even if later on they each go their separate ways to pursue better opportunities.
3) Fosters good communication
Still, on the advantages of team cooperation, it also enhances effective communication within employees and the organization at large. Employees who work well together and consider themselves as part of the team incline towards better communication. As they cooperate, they begin to learn how to communicate with each other, skills of effective communication and even learn to recognize subtle variations in the same.
As an advantage, enhanced communication in an organization can have a profound effect on its overall performance, and the entire organization can benefit from team cooperation that leads to better communication.
Furthermore, effective communication in an organization reduces misunderstandings, conflicts, and delays in work deliverythisis very important for the success of the organization.
4) Easy achievement of organizational goals
It’s high time that all managers start to realize that it is their responsibility to enhance and build relationships between employees. It can be agreed that creating the right level of teamwork is not always easy. However, having said that we need to keep in mind that it is not impossible. Creativity, determination and the will to take the initiative are the qualities required for a team to succeed.
As a manager, it is important that you motivate your employees so that they work towards a goal and set to achieve it. In an organizational atmosphere, you must be able to promote the best possible ethics among a workforce. This will ensure that everyone will get on board and strive to work towards the common goal.
With team cooperation, everyone’s morale will get naturally boosted once there is a healthy work environment, improving employee motivation and ultimately incline everyone towards the achievement of organizational goals, visions, and objective.
5) Establishes trust
Working in a team builds confidence in any setting, and in teamcooperation, it creates strong relationships among employees.
In as much as employees argue, disagree and even fight, at the end of the day they learn to accommodate each other’s characters, strengths, and weakness to be able to work together. When employees trust each other in a team, they establish a strong foundation of relationships that endure minor conflicts especially those that arise due to individual differences.
Trust in a team also tends to allow a brilliant flow of ideas. This helps team members to share their thoughts and encourage each other during and after work.
Team cooperation, in general, allows employees to learn its importance and that losses and wins affect each member of the team. This in turn instills confidence in them about the other teammates.
Conclusion
Team cooperation is a lot of fun and quite advantageous. If a team is good, then you can expect good results and better profits. It increases the success rate of the organization and helps to achieve the common goals. That is perhaps one of the best advantages of team cooperation.
Working together and in cooperation is better that working competitively. When employees are encouraged to cooperate in an organization, their output tends to multiply. In actuality, you also maximize productivity and profits when you embrace team cooperation in your organization.
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