OGL 343 Module 7 Final Dream Team Paper: Becoming a Better Teammate and Team Leader Example

My Dream Team Playbook: Lessons for Being a Better Teammate and Team Leader

Student Name

BA in Organizational Leadership, Arizona State University

OGL 343: Social Processes in Organizations

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

My Dream Team Playbook: Lessons for Being a Better Teammate and Team Leader

Introduction

When this course began, I thought a good team came down to luck: get the right people and things work out. Sixteen short essays later, I see teams as systems that can be designed, understood and improved. This paper compiles the lessons from my Dream Team essays into five themes. For each, I summarize the research, describe how it showed up in my course team, and state how I will act as a teammate and as a team leader.

Lesson 1: Teams Develop, and Conflict Is Part of It

Reviewing decades of small-group research, Tuckman (1965) described four phases new teams tend to move through, labeled forming, storming, norming and performing. My course team's first video conference was polite and vague, a classic forming stage. In week three, two members disagreed sharply about our project topic, and I worried we were failing. In fact we were storming, and the disagreement produced the team charter rules that later carried us.

As a teammate, I will treat early friction as normal rather than as a sign that the team is broken. As a team leader, I will plan for the storming stage by building time for disagreement into early meetings and by writing norms down once the team agrees on them.

Lesson 2: Effort Depends on Design, Not Just Character

Group research has shown again and again that people often put in less effort on shared work than on solo work, a pattern called social loafing. Pooling 78 studies, Karau and Williams (1993) showed that people slack off less when their own share of the work can be seen, when the task matters to them and when they care about the group. When one of our members missed two deadlines, my first reaction was frustration. Our charter had assigned sections only to the team as a whole, so no one's contribution was visible.

As a teammate, I will make my own contribution visible by posting drafts on time and naming what I completed. As a leader, I will assign clear individual ownership of tasks and connect each person's part to the team's goal, rather than assuming that some people are simply lazy.

Lesson 3: People Speak Up When It Is Safe

Edmondson (1999) studied work teams and reported that groups who felt safe taking interpersonal risks did more of the work of learning, from raising questions to examining their own errors. In our team, the quietest member had the most experience with the software we used, but she did not mention it until the fourth week, when someone asked her directly.

As a teammate, I will ask my questions out loud, even the ones that reveal a gap, so quieter members have permission to ask theirs. As a leader, I will invite input from each member by name, respond to bad news with curiosity and admit my own mistakes first.

Lesson 4: Conflict Must Be Managed, Not Celebrated

I came to the chapter on conflict believing that disagreement about tasks is always healthy. A meta-analysis complicated that view: across studies, disagreement over the work hurt team results and satisfaction about as much as personal friction did (De Dreu & Weingart, 2003). Our topic dispute helped us only because we kept it about the project and resolved it within one meeting.

As a teammate, I will keep disagreements focused on ideas and avoid comments about people. As a leader, I will step in when a task disagreement starts to become personal and use our charter's decision rule to close debates that have run their course.

Lesson 5: Leaders Shape Conditions More Than Moments

Hackman (2002) placed less weight on what a leader does in the moment and more on the conditions set up in advance, among them a bounded team, a goal that energizes members, a work design that helps, organizational backing and coaching at the right moments. Our project went well once we had a clear goal and a structure of roles, and it struggled when we lacked both.

As a teammate, I will help clarify direction by restating our goal at the start of meetings. As a leader, I will spend my energy early on setting direction and structure, so the team needs less rescuing later.

Conclusion

Compiling my Dream Team essays showed me that most team problems I once blamed on people were problems of design: unclear tasks, unsafe climates and unmanaged conflict. The five lessons in this paper form a playbook I can use in my next team at work. Being a better teammate means making my effort visible and my voice honest; being a better leader means building the conditions in which everyone else can do the same.

References

De Dreu, C. K. W., & Weingart, L. R. (2003). Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 741-749. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.741

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Karau, S. J., & Williams, K. D. (1993). Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 681-706. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.4.681

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100