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Keywords
Employees, Teamwork, Skills, Success
Abstract
Business expects far more from employees than technical and generic skills. There is a growing emphasis on employees to not just do their job but to contribute to business success. As the emphasis is placed on individuals contributing to the effective, positive perpetuation of the business through the development of professional and work related skills; the team culture of business today places additional emphasis on the ability to work effectively within a team environment. Specifically, this paper will discuss the importance of social interdependence and teamwork and the implications for business success and team success
Introduction
Businesses today want much more from their employees than just putting in a day's work. They expect that employees have a combination of attributes that will benefit the business and contribute to the success of the business (Johnson et aL, 2000). Business success specifically means profit-generation. Profit-generation does not just mean employees generating cash flow and contacts for the business but also includes the ability of employees to create and maintain positive working relationships with colleagues, clients and superordinates.
The attributes needed for this consist of a combination of technical, knowledge and generic skills. Working in business team environments demands much more from employees than the traditional combination of industry-specific knowledge and skills. Skills such as problem solving, communication, collaboration, interpersonal skills, social skills and time management are actively being targeted by prospective employers as essential requirements for employability especially in team environments. Employers consistently mention collaboration and teamwork as being a critical skill, essential in almost all working environments. As most businesses rely on teamwork to be productive these attributes are then needed for successful teamwork. The attributes can be viewed from different perspectives, ranging in nature from "visible to invisible"
(Figure 1).
A team member, who is the programmer, must have acceptable technical skills in programming. This skill can be tested for competence, and classified as a "visible skill" (Wysocki et al., 1995). Also, having acceptable generic and team skills is highly desirable but not always easily testable, i.e. testing for time management, problem solving or collaboration skills can be challenging? An element of team skills, known as "social interdependence" (Salovey and Mayer, 1990) is increasingly being...