Team Building Exercise
The Effect Team Building Exercises Have on the Corporate Sector
A dissertation submitted by Ian Harnett in partial completion of the award for BSC (HONS) Sport Development and Coaching Sciences.
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Chapter TWO - Literature Review
Effectiveness of Team Building
Carron and Hausenblas (1998) suggest that when successful, team building exercises create a team synergy which consequently leads to improved team performance.
Further, Twomey and Kleiner (1996) explain the importance of a cohesive team, how one in three businesses fail within their first year and a method used to create cohesion is the promotion of the team building exercise.
Tjosvold et al. (2005) and Twomey and Kleiner (1996) argue the views held by Ward (1986) insisting that team building exercise not only enhances performance within an organisation but it is transmitted to all clients and/or customers, an attractive advantage in today's cutting edge business climate.
The earlier views from Liker (1961) are in conjunction with the views from Robins et al. (2004) addressing the necessity for a cohesive team.
Hackman (1987) develops his observations, stating that teams, if not working effectively, can have a less than desirable effect.
They can waste time and energy, create destructive conflict and notoriously make bad decisions.
Trent (2003) simply mentions that high performing team exercises provide benefits far outweighing their cost, and conversely, poorly designed or motivated teams can create serious organisational stress.
If managers therefore believe their teams are not effective the challenge must be to increase the likelihood of a successful environment.
One of the few studies within the field concluded that the use of teams is popular within corporations and is a growing design (Trent 2003).
If this is the case then the need for synergy within the growing numbers of teams should surely be an imperative priority for company directors.
Team Building Case Study
Previous quantitative research conducted includes a study by Buller and Bell (1986) who observed fifty three hard rock miners working in underground metal mines over a ten week period.
The results show how productivity increased after the team building intervention was executed.
Before and After Team Building Interventions (TB)
| Experimental Conditions | Before TB | After TB |
| Team Building | 65.83 | 80.00 |
| Control Group | 62.5 | 56.25 |
Source: Buller and Bell (1986)
Table 4 measures productivity of workers; how many tonnes of material were mined over a set period of time.
As the results show there was a significant increase in productivity directly attributable to team building.
Buller and Bell(1986) mention that there were few negative responses to team building excersises, questionnaires showed that employees perceived team building as having improved productivity.
In this instance team building had the desired effect on production.
