At some point in time, everyone has been apart of a team in one way or another.

However, being apart of a high performance and effective team is not quite as common. There are many aspects that go into building a successful and high performing team, from composing the right team, to being committed to that team day in and day out. In order to make sure your team is successful in the future, you should make sure you compose the right team by assigning member roles, evaluating member abilities, and consider the different member personalities. After you have composed your team you must make sure to communicate with one another, use your complimentary skills, and stay committed to the project in order to maintain the highest level of performance possible. As stated above, there are many steps that need to be taken in order to create a high performance team. The process starts by deciding who you would like in your group. Composing the team is no easy task. This is an important step because it shows what kind of group you would like to craft. Not only do you have to decide who you want in the group but the type of group. When the team is created, a clear purpose must be established immediately. A strategic guide for building effective teams by (Mealiea,Baltazar,144) defines clear purposes as the condition where group members agree on the groups goals. All of the members must be on the same page so the team can work as efficiently and effectively as possible towards that purpose. As times are changing, a diverse skill set is necessary to succeed in any environment. As a result, what a team should do to continue their efforts at being effective is assign member roles. Each person has a unique skill set. For this reason, specifying the roles of each member allows the team to work independently and continues to be effective. In the textbook Organizational Behavior, a role is defined as a pattern of behavior that a person is expected to display in a given context (Colquitt, Lepine, Wesson, 358.) When building a team, there are many different roles that members can take on and develop which have strong impacts on the teams effectiveness. Team Task roles are behaviors that directly facilitate the accomplishment of team tasks (Colquitt, Lepine, Wesson, 358.) Examples of Team task roles would be an orientor who directs the team, the devils advocate who offers constructive challenges, and the energizer who motivates the members of the group. There are also Team building roles, which are the behaviors that influence the quality of the teams social environment. Examples of team building roles would be the harmonizer, who helps solve issues that arise between team members, the encourager, who praises the work of others, and the compromiser who helps the team see other solutions that teammates can accept when there are differences (Colquitt, Lepine, Wesson, 358.) Lastly, there are individualistic roles that reflect behaviors that benefit the individual at the expense of the team. Most of the time individualistic roles are damaging towards the team and should be avoided. This also plays a role with each team members abilities. Not everyone has the same abilities; so distinguishing each person's capabilities allows each person to work within their means. But, the members cannot be content with the assigned tasks. Members should be ambitious and continue to push themselves for the benefit of the group.

Complementary skills are essential to the improvement of a team. Complementary skills are when two separate entities are different but combined form a useful or attractive combination of skills, or qualities. This is great in a team environment because what one person lacks another with that strength can easily make up for. A true display of teamwork accomplishing tasks that otherwise would not be completed due to a lack of human capital. The next paragraph will illustrate complementary skills, and the subgroups within it. When forming a team a person simply doesnt just choose random people out of the woodwork. There must be a strategy, and reasoning behind each person chosen. Groups should complete self-assessments, which allows groups and their members to assess performance, changing environments, and existing goals. Such assessment allows groups to determine when changes should be made to ensure group success (Mealiea,Baltazar,145). An assessment of performance is key to a teams success because it shows each member their progress and how they are performing. The leader of a group can use this information to keep all of the members honest and performing at their full potential. Some people tend to become content with their current status, so its the job of the leader to keep the other members focused and ambitious. This assessment also aids in determining everyone's skills and whether or not theyre complimentary with the other members. Networking is an important skill to have if you are part of a team. Having the ability to build and maintain a relationship is great for not only personal goals, but can be as well on a team level. Networking is defined as reflects group members ability and willingness to link up with others external to the group. Such contacts can be drawn upon for information, support, and assistance when needed facilitate goal achievement I. The last subgroup of complementary skills is diversity. In the article by (Mealiea,Baltazar,145) it mentions diversity as when group members are not only tolerant of style and behavioral differences but also actively seek out those differences necessary to perform and develop. This is great for the creativity of a group. It allows members to think outside the box and come up with new ideas based on each of their own perceptions. Diversity signifies uniqueness within a group allowing each member incentives to provide answers to tasks.

One of the most important parts of maintaining a high performance and highly effective team is to be committed to the task at hand. Without commitment to the work, there is no way that the team will be working at a high level. Oneway to be sure that group members are committed is to challenge them and let them take on new possibilities. In an article titled Building High-Performance Teams by Harvey Dubin, Dubin states The not-so-secret ingredient for high performance is to compel the people in your company with a new possibility. They become stakeholders who commit to the ventures success because they see the benefit to themselves, as well as the company (46.) This could be described as an example of Affective Commitment. Affective Commitment is defined in the textbook Organizational Behavior, as a desire to remain a member of an organization due to an emotional attachment to, and involvement

with, that organization (Colquitt, Lepine, Wesson, 64). A group member who is affectively committed strongly identifies with the goals of the organization and desires to remain a part of the group. Simply put, this member commits to the organization because he or she wants to. So, by compelling people within a group with new possibilities, they develop emotional attachment to those possibilities because they know how it can benefit themselves and the organization as a whole. They want to be apart of it and are therefore committed. Another form of organizational commitment is Continuance Commitment, which is defined in Organizational Behavior as a desire to remain a member of an organization because of the awareness of the costs associated with leaving. Or in other words, you stay because you need to (64.) One reason continuance commitment is such a powerful form of commitment is because of the lack of employment alternatives. It is not smart to just get up and quit on a job when you do not know if there is another job available to you. The last form of organizational commitment is normative commitment. This type of commitment occurs when someone desires to remain a member of an organization due to the feeling of obligation. This usually occurs when someone feels like they have invested a lot of time towards a task or towards someone else and they do not want to let their organization or employer down. Another extremely important aspect of a team is communication. Communication can make or break a team. In an article titled, The New Science of Building Great Teams, the author states, It seems almost absurd that how we communicate could be so much more important to success than what we communicate (Pentland, 62). The importance of communication was demonstrated in an example where two identical teams at a bank call center, and one team excelled mightily over the other just because they were much better at communicating. It has been found that patterns of communication are the most important predictor of a teams success. Not only that, but they are as significant as all the other factors individual intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussion combined (Pentland, 62). Through Pentlands research, she discovered that there are three aspects of communication that affect team performance. The first is energy, which we measure by the number and the nature of exchanges among team members. As expected, the most valuable form of communication is face-to-face. However, which I find a bit more shocking because of how popular they are, e-mail and texting are the least valuable forms of communication (Pentland, 65). The second most important measurement of communication is engagement, which reflects the distribution of energy among team members. Every team should strive to have strong engagement, which means that every member has relatively high energy with every other member. The last critical dimension of communication is exploration. This has to do with the communication that each team member engages in outside of the team environment. High-performing teams and creative teams especially, seek more outside connections. The more that a team explores, the more multidimensional they can be. Exploration also provides for a

high amount of networking, which can prove to be very important for a successful team. As stated earlier, it is not what we say; it is how we communicate it. There is always more than one side to communication. You need listeners, leaders, and followers. Every one of these is essential for effective communication. Other extremely important factors to communication and an effective team are team states. These are the specific types of feelings and thoughts that coalesce in the minds of team members as a consequence of their experience working together (Colquitt, Lepine, Wesson, 394). Every team should strive for cohesion. This is an emotional attachment in which the members of the team have trusting relationships, strong emotional bonds to one another, and fosters high levels of motivation and commitment to the team. Potency is another team state that many high performance teams possess. This helps with confidence and helps each member believe that they can be successful. High potency can keep the team members from doubting or questioning each other, and increases teamwork. Potency is increased through team members confidence in their own capabilities, their trust in other members capabilities, and positive feedback about past performances (Colquitt, Lepine, Wesson, 395). These are not all of the team states, and others may prove to be effective as well. But, if a team can have a high amount of cohesion and potency, they are on the right track to perform very well.