Essay 3, 4Loko, Group 4

In order for increased team productivity, “let’s get psyched about safety!” Psychological safety occurs when individuals in a team are comfortable expressing their ideas at work (Edmondson and Roloff, 2008, p. 48). This strategy helps overcome new challenges that individuals are faced with, giving each individual the opportunity to freely express concerns or ideas to the larger group in order to make decisions (Edmondson, 2003, p. 1444). This in turn reduces content failure, which is when information between team members is missing or inaccurate (Lingard et al., 2004, p. 332). Implementing a team checklist can also efficiently facilitate information sharing between team members. This would help with any communication problems that occur between team members due to a lack of psychological safety (Lingard et al., 2004, p. 331).

Furthermore, to increase team productivity, “don’t hate – collaborate!” Collaborative planning improves a group’s performance by giving teams better performance strategies and allowing information integration to occur in a group (Woolley et al., 2008, p. 357). Team members then become aware of how their individual contributions relate to the collective task. In addition, collaborative planning interventions help improve the structure of a team and their work, thus improving team productivity (Woolley et al., 2008, p. 368).

Along with collaborative planning, “experience and expertise creates for an effective team”. It is important to integrate both expertise and collaborative planning. Members of a team need to be aware of each other’s expertise to be able to effectively collaborate with one another and increase their productivity. Without collaborative planning, critical unshared information may be withheld, with more emphasis placed on discussing shared information. Furthermore, tasks will not be given to individuals with the correct expertise and team members may be given tasks which are below or above their skill set (Woolley et al., 2008, p. 355).