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According to Whetten & Cameron, there are two main roles that enhance team performance: task-facilitating role and relationship-building roles. The task-facilitating role is when a team member helps the team accomplish the objectives or outcomes of the team (Whetten & Cameron, 2011). In other words, task-facilitating members help accomplish the tasks assigned in order to reach the team’s goals. There are at least 10 common task-facilitating roles for team members: direction giving, information seeking, information giving, elaborating, urging, monitoring, process analysis, reality testing, enforcing, and summarizing. Task facilitating roles tend to help the team work more effectively and efficiently by ensuring the team stays focused on task. There’s also evidence that team members of a high performance team have a certain amount of interpersonal cohesion and collaboration, interdependent, and have positive affect among team members (Whetten & Cameron, 2011).

The relationship-building role emphasizes on the interpersonal aspects of the team (Whetten & Cameron, 2011). Relationship-building roles focus on building unity, collaboration, assisting team members to feel good about one another, and maintain a tension-free climate (Whetten & Cameron, 2011). In other words, this role emphasizes on building the relationship between team members of the team. For this role there are at least 10 common relationship-building roles: supporting, harmonizing, tension relieving, confronting, energizing, developing, consensus building, and empathizing.

Looking at my past experiences of working on team, I believe I’m more of a task-oriented person than I am a “people” person per say. Reflecting on the definitions above, I believe I take on the role of task facilitating on a high performance team. I have always personally had a hard time connecting with other individuals so I tend to wait until others open up to me first before I can fully trust them and their judgments. Therefore, it’s hard for me to help improve the unity or relationship in the team when I barely know the individuals in the team. For example, if I had met with some of those individuals and have had the time to connect with them then I do try and help as much as I can on building that relationship and the relationship with those who I do know because I trust them. In other words, I collaborate and expect more from those who I do know than from those who are new to the team. But I have also realized that on the eyes of others this seems to come across as favoritism, which is not what I intend it to be.

When it comes to tasks, if the mission, expected outcomes, and/or goals are clearly stated then from experience I can say I do guide my team through the tasks in order to reach the team’s goals and accomplish the mission. If there’s extra time, typically, I like to go back and see places where task improvement can be made or try to go above and beyond on our work. At the end of every project, I tend to ask all team members for their feedback on: How do you think the overall project went? Where can we improve? Do you think we could’ve done the tasks more effectively and efficiently? If so, how? And so on. Like I mentioned above, I’m not the type of person to know how to fix relationships or unite people. This is one of my greatest weaknesses. Its something that I have always struggled with and it’s a working progress. Now with the semester being over, I cant exactly put what I have learned here into practice but keeping notes along with the textbook will help me understand more and hopefully guide me on how to gain a better balance between the task-facilitating role and the relationship-building role.

Reference:

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2011). Developing Self-Awareness. Developing management skills (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall/Pearson.