Teamwork

Teamwork is any joint action by a group of people, in which each person subordinates his individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group. If this teamwork is successful, this group becomes a team.

Definitions

According to the FAA AC 120-72,

Teamwork. Joint action by a group of people, in which each person subordinates his individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group.

Team skills

In maintenance training

According to the FAA AC 120-72,

1. Team skills and coordination are a vital part of the MRM concept. Competence in team skills tends to be independent of competence in technical skills, yet both skills are equally important in accomplishing the final goal. Unfortunately, organizations rarely devote time and resources to teach these team skills formally. MRM training provides maintenance organizations the vehicle to accomplish this. The discussion of teams has been inferential up to this point. This section will discuss teams specifically. In this way, concepts like inter- and intra-team behavior can be understood with more precision.
2. Certain qualities differentiate a team of people from a group of people. Among these are size, a common goal, and interdependence.
3. First, team size is an important issue in what constitutes a team. Obviously, teams consist of more than one person. The addition of more people does not necessarily mean an increase in team performance. Additional team members increase the need for all team members to expend time and resources in order to coordinate the team's activities toward accomplishing its goals. A team with many members may fracture and create sub-groups or cliques that possess goals different from, or even in opposition to, the team's primary goal. In this sense, the return on performance decreases dramatically as more people are added. For any one particular task, there are an optimum number of people who can do the job; more or fewer people will result in a performance loss. Though the optimum number depends on the team task, process loss becomes significant with more than 10 members.
4. Secondly, a team works together to accomplish a unified goal or goals. That goal could be an engine change or performing a heavy maintenance check. It must be understood that, just as repairing an airplane consists of numerous steps, a team's ultimate goal is also composed of sub-goals. Each sub-goal must be accomplished in order to reach the team's ultimate goal.
5. A final quality that is needed to define a team is interdependence. Interdependence is defined as a team situation in which members depend on one another to finish the final job. An activity that can be completed by a single person without having to rely on others is not highly interdependent. For example, even though a group of maintenance personnel can fuel a plane more quickly than one individual alone, if each individual should drop out over time, the person left could still finish the task.
6. Taken together, a team is defined as a group of interdependent individuals working together to complete a specific task. The amount of interdependence demonstrated by team members may vary when completing their own individual tasks. For example, a maintenance team washing a plane depends only on each team member to contribute to his or her individual task. However, each member relies on one another to achieve his or her final goal (finishing the wash). This is known as additive labor, i.e., each team member adds his or her work to the task at hand. A maintenance team changing out a main gear, on the other hand, has a greater amount of interdependence among the team members to finish the task. The essential characteristics of a team are:
   1. A team is a group of interdependent individuals working together to complete a specific task.
   2. All team members depend on one another's knowledge, skills, and abilities to finish the final job. The amount of interdependence among team members may vary from one team to another.
7. This analysis of teams and teamwork provides a clearer picture of the composition of a maintenance team. Though teams are usually composed of members in the same location at the same time, this may not always be the case. For example, consider a team that performs a heavy maintenance check in a hanger. Because each team member is working on separate parts of the aircraft, they are separated both in location and sometimes in time. However, when analyzed in terms of the ultimate goal (finishing the check) and being interdependent (each member may have unique maintenance skills, such as airframe, powerplant, or avionics skills etc. that are necessary to perform the heavy check), the definition of a team applies. Also note that the other MRM skills, such as constant communication and people skills, are also at work in this example.
8. Teams have certain characteristics that make them effective. The following table lists ten important characteristics of an effective team.
9. Maintenance operations are frequently characterized by large teams, working on disjointed tasks, spread out over a hanger. As a result, maintenance operations rely heavily on asynchronous communication. Because the team members are spread out, there is a lag between queries and responses among team members. As a result of this dependence on asynchronous communication, the team adapts to changes in its environment very slowly. Consequently, as teams become increasingly interdependent, more media for communications and more standardized procedures should be in place. In addition, a maintenance task may require multiple teams (hanger, shop, management) each with their own responsibilities. Therefore, MRM places emphasis on inter-team (between crews) skills as well as intra-team (within crew) skills.

Effective teamwork: ten characteristics of an effective team

1	Clear purpose	The team has a clear purpose or mission that is accepted by all members.
2	Relaxed interaction	The team is relaxed and informal, with no obvious tensions among members.
3	Participation	There is a lot of discussion between members and everyone participates in decisions and/or activities.
4	Listening	Each team member actively listens to one another.
5	Disagreement	Team members are comfortable enough to disagree with one another if the situation calls for it.
6	Openness	There is full and open communication with no hidden agendas.
7	Clear expectations	There are clear expectations about the role of each of the team, and work assignments are fairly distributed among team members.
8	Shared leadership	Although there may be a formal team leader, each team member may share leadership responsibilities from time to time as the situation arises.
9	Relations with others	The team maintains credibility and good relations with others who may be outside the formal team but who can still affect its functioning.
10	Team maintenance	Team members not only focus on their primary goal but spend time recognizing and maintaining the functions of the team itself.

Related concepts

• Human factors.

Related lectures

• Employee Resource Management Training.