Conclusion
In this chapter, a deep insight was developed about how teams are formed and what makes a team effective. Also examined were divergent teaching styles and learning styles to show how teamwork can be effective in learning organizations.
A review of this chapter’s major conclusions, include:
- A team is a group with complementary skills who work together to accomplish goals. Using the form of checks and balances is an effective measure to establish guidelines within teams.
- Experiential learning, project-based learning, and inquiry-based learning are effective divergent methods to use in learning organizations. It is important to provide people with the opportunity to learn, and have them to set the course for their own learning.
- Online Collaborative Learning (OCL) is a new way to foster learning in a modern environment, but pitfalls can be present from decreased deep communication, removing that face-to-face component.
- The make-up of formal and informal teams use the dynamics of cross-functional, virtual, and self-managing teams, depending on the organizational goals and situations.
- Effective teams within the workplace develop through the five stages of forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Leaders and groups, either internally or externally, need to create boundaries, and keep open lines of communication with teams and individuals.
Within this chapter, communication within teams was shown to be an important factor, especially when establishing relationships in the team-forming process. This will lead into the next chapter about communication, with a discussion on the forms of communications and their effectiveness inside of a learning organization.
