Sunday, September 21, 2014

A520.6.5.RB - Team Roles

Both task facilitating and relationship building roles play a huge part in managing a team.  As a supervisor, I find that I lean more toward relationship building, than task facilitating.  I am generally someone who tries to understand others emotions and respond based on what I am gathering from them, so I feel that I naturally lean more toward relationship building roles.  Whetton and Cameron note that relationship-building roles emphasize support, harmony, tension relief, confrontation, energizing, developmental, consensus building, and empathizing characteristics.  I always try to bring harmony into a situation by using support and understanding.  I find that a lot of problems occur in a team when people do not respect the leader.  For me, I find that respect is usually earned when you show relationship building characteristics to the other individuals.  Once I have established a relationship, task-facilitating roles seem to become easier and provide a better result. 

As we discussed this week in our class discussion, high performance teams are often built on a variety of individuals with differing backgrounds.  Tossing out tasks immediately may not go over well because people are still getting to know one another and understand what they have to offer.  While high-performance teams generally move fairly fast, the relationship-building segment of the team is crucial to the success.  When the team is getting along it makes it a lot easier to be success and I believe that implementing the characteristics noted in the reading this week would aid in that success. 

I feel that as a team member, I generally look at how the team structure is doing – is everyone happy, is there anything I can do, what is missing, what is and is not working – once I’ve determined those issues, I can then build off relationships to implement tasks with.  I feel that the roles work off of each other to help make a stronger team, but for me personally, I find that starting with relationship building is easiest when working on the dynamics of a team structure. 


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

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