Respond to the posts on topic manager's job in a team and non-team environment

by Shravya Billa

A team environment is when group of people work on a particular project together. It can either be the software development or hardware design or can be verification and validation part of the project. A team can be a mix of employees of different levels such as staff engineers, software developers, design engineers and more (Ahmed, 2019). In short, it is a group of employees working towards the same goal. Managers play a huge role in the team in achieving this goal.

In a team, Managers’ major responsibility would be to ensure smooth operations in the team. Their role is to provide support and guidance to the employees, managing the team tasks, setting the goals for the employees and team as a whole, managing the employee trainings and conduction employees’ and team performance evaluation. When working as a team, having conflicts is quite common as every individuals perspective and methodologies of working on a particular task differs. They have to encourage the team building activities that can help everyone engage and collaborate with the team members which can result in improving the quality and speed of the tasks (Greer et al., 2018).

As opposed to team environment, non-team environments are more like individual work environment. Each employee has their own set of tasks assigned and set goals. In such environments, usually the employees will be working on different projects simultaneously. They don’t handle tasks concentrated on a single project or collaborate with other employees. In such environments, the Managers mostly see through the much higher-level tasks of the organizations rather than concentrated group of employees. They responsibilities might include over viewing the tasks of different departments and their goals. They do not have any direct connections with the employees, nor they are responsible for the employees’ tasks or goals (Smith, 2019). This sort of environment always raises a scope for less efficiency and efficacy in the organizations. Though it might seem to have its own pros, one cannot ignore the cons as well.

References:

Ahmed, A. (2019, April 29). The Roles & Responsibilities of Team Managers. Bizfluent. https://bizfluent.com/info-8232176-roles-responsibilities-team-managers.html.

Greer, L. L., de Jong, B. A., Schouten, M. E., & Dannals, J. E. (2018). Why and when hierarchy impacts team effectiveness: A meta-analytic integration. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(6), 591–613. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000291

Smith, H. A. (2019). Manager as coach characteristics for dealing with team challenge. Journal of Work-Applied Management, 11(2), 165–173. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwam-06-2019-0022