Teamwork is so important that it is virtually impossible for you to reach the heights of your capabilities or make the money that you want without becoming very good at it. - Brian Tracy

Teamwork is the concept of people working together cooperatively, as in a sports team - soccer makes the best example.

Business projects require multiple people to work together, and so teamwork is a very important concept in the business field.

Our daily lives can be very well guided by rules and guidelines from the business environment, so it is always worthwhile to learn something new on this subject even if it at first it doesn’t seem to relate.

What exactly is a team?

According to Webster’s On-line Dictionary a team is “a group organized to work together.” However, this definition doesn’t do much to help us understand what a team truly is. A more useful definition comes from Parker & Kroop (1999, p. 7), who define a team as “a group of people with a high degree of interdependence focused on the achievement of some goal or task.“

Teamwork basics

Not all the work that is done together or in close proximity of others is teamwork. Teamwork is the work done by a group of people that fits these four characteristics.

1. Shared goals. Members of a team have a common goal. Simply put: teams have work to do. Each component of the team works toward the same goal as the one next to him, even if they do different types of work.
2. Interdependence. Team members cannot achieve their shared goals single-handedly, but instead, must rely on each other.
3. Cooperation. This results from the interdependence of the members. Since members depend on one another, it is of absolute importance that they cooperate.
4. Boundedness and stability. Boundedness means the team has an identifiable membership and that its members, as well as nonmembers, know who is and who isn’t on the team. The stability aspect refers to the fact that the members of the team work together for a long enough time in order to accomplish their goal.

Now that we have a pretty good idea about teams and teamwork, let’s extrapolate a little.

I believe it’s safe to say that most people – if not all – want to be wealthy. By wealth I’m not referring only to money or other material aspects of wealth, but more to the fullness of the human existence. And if most of us want to be wealthy, it means that we have a shared goal.

Now let’s say that you want to become a movie director. It is obvious that you cannot simply go to a film studio and start directing films. You have to go through various causes and conditions and channels. You cannot achieve your goal all by yourself and must rely on others. This means that we’re interdependent in achieving our shared goal.

Most people know that we create our own destiny and some are even aware that we’re doing it in cooperation with the rest of the world. We only exist in cooperation with everything there is around us; we depend on working together. We continuously cooperate.

The last two characteristics of teamwork can also found in the daily life: the different organizational methods of our society (cities, countries, etc) have a certain amount of boundedness and stability.

The whole mankind is a big team. We should become aware of this and help each other out more often.

All that I can hope for is that by raising my voice I can help you help the greatest cause there is: “goodwill among men and peace on earth.” (Albert Einstein)

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