The Advantages & Disadvantages Of Task Groups In Business

By Philip Yiga | January 23, 2017

There are different strategies used in businesses to make them prosperous and task groups are one of those strategies that can be used to ensure fast achievement of the different goals in your business. Task groups are more like work groups but the major difference is that task groups work in a much bigger organizational perspective so if you find people who work collectively in big organizations on a particular task, those are called task groups. Task groups are usually handed the duty of adding a particular role to the attainment of the goals attributed by that organization. Sometimes tasks groups are put in place for short term jobs while in other times they are put together to accomplish a duty that has already been ongoing such problem solving or increasing the company’s productivity. In order to utilize the efficiency of task groups it is important that you exhaust the advantages as well as the disadvantages of using them in your business.

ADVANTAGES OF USING TASK GROUPS IN BUSINESS

To make it easier for you to understand let us begin with the advantages that make task groups worthy of being used in your business and they are as discussed below……………

1. Socialization

For any business to prosper it is very important for workers to feel comfortable and have a sense of togetherness while on the job and this can only come about as a result of using task groups. When people work in groups it creates involvement among the different members of the group as they can easily communicate and share with each other and thus make the organization an interesting place for everyone. With such togetherness, members of the business are always looking forward to the next time they will be going to work which in the end makes them more productive. When workers participate in duties together they are more exposed to one another which makes the workplace very comfortable for them reason being it will be very easy for them to associate with anyone.

2. Hands leadership to coworkers

Instead of being under the leadership of senior members of the organization task groups create situations where coworkers take over leadership during the specific tasks they are given. As soon as groups are created, members of the group are given the chance to choose a coworker that will act as their leader during that particular task. As the tasks change, the group might as well alternate leadership among themselves to give everyone the chance to gain some leadership skills which is very good for the functioning of the business. Such moments also make workers feel more important about themselves and as a result commit more to the business.

3. Versatility in decision making

When you use task groups, decision making becomes easier in a way that you can get so many ideas and suggestions from different people and by the time a decision is made, almost everyone will have agreed to it. Involving business members in decision making is another strategy to improve their performance as they feel like superiors treasure their presence in the company. From the versatility of ideas provided when people work in task groups it is very hard or even impossible to fail to get those excellent ideas that will make your business successful.

4. Outstanding focus

When people are working in a group they concentrate better on the task at hand, even if one member of the group is not focused at least the rest of the members will be responsible for ensuring that they accomplish tasks within the given time unlike when it is only one person working on the job. Because of their concentration, groups tend to come with solutions that an individual manager would never have been able to find.

5. Flexibility

The presence of task groups in business makes the business a lot more flexible reason being successful businesses have lots of projects to attend to so having task groups will enable the business accomplish all various projects which may not possible when people work individually. As long as you have groups that collaborate well, you will have peace of mind that there is always a group of people to deliver solutions to those emergency situations that you might not have planned for earlier.

6. Balanced employee support

In business, all individuals have differing skill levels and experience. Therefore you will find that those who are highly experienced and highly skilled require less support as they can work on their own with no supervision while those with very little or no experience lack skills and need a lot of support from superiors to help them acquire the necessary skills. However when the business is using task groups it becomes very easy to balance out the support since those with lower skills can easily learn from the highly skilled members during their tasks as a group. Even the most difficult tasks become very easy when people have their skills well balanced in form of task groups, this also makes the job of the managerial team simpler.

7. Cross training

This is the process in which business members are trained through making them carry out tasks that are usually carried out by other members. Cross training becomes extremely easy and successful when people work in groups reason being they can quickly get used to the culture of helping out others whenever it is necessary. In a business where each member has an idea about the other’s task, productivity is never paused but rather a continuous process reason being the absence of one member doesn’t affect the organization at all if there is another one that stands in to accomplish the task.

8. Better communication and information exchange

The amazing thing about communication or sharing information with task groups is that you have to communicate once and everyone will receive the message instead of having to talk each and every person individually. When information is delivered to a group it spreads much faster to all different members due to the cooperation and relation that exists among members which is definitely not the case for those businesses where tasks are tackled on a personal or individual basis.

9. Team commitment

Another really important point about using task groups in business is that fact that you get commitment of an entire group instead of just one single person and of course the results that are obtained from commitment of a group will be much higher. While people in work groups they commit better to attaining a particular goal and every member of that group puts in their best to make sure that at the end of the job it turns out perfect.

10. Collective feedback

It is very tiring to get feedback from each member so if a business is using task groups, they can make the process shorter and effortless by getting a group’s collective feedback.

 

DISADVANTAGES OF USING TASK GROUPS IN BUSINESS

Of course everything has an advantage and disadvantage and there is no exception when it comes to task groups. After looking at all the advantages of task groups being used in business it is just inevitable to find out what the disadvantages could be and below they are……………….

1. Individual abilities are unrecognized

While working in groups the best members are never recognized or even rewarded simply because it is all about the achievement of the task group as a whole and not who in the group did their best to accomplish the task. Research shows that the best strategy to get an employee to perform to the best of their ability is by appreciating and rewarding them which doesn’t happen in businesses that use task groups. This in the end results into great dissatisfaction and loss of confidence to those individuals whose abilities have been ignored.

2. Increase in interpersonal conflict

In most cases tasks groups shift leadership from management to the coworkers themselves which is disastrous because you will find everyone in the group wanting to be the leader. This competition for leadership is a very major cause of conflicts among workers and continuous discrepancy which is not good for the development of the business. The presence of task groups can result into conflict among members of the same group or members of one group and another.

3. Delay in decision making

With thousands of ideas from different members of the task group and too many people disagreeing the decision making process becomes much longer than it is supposed to be hence prolonging the production process. In addition, because of the bandwagon in task groups, members of a particular might agree to a decision not because it is what they want or what they think will work but because the leader of the group agrees to it and the rest of the group members are obliged to please him or her. Such a wrong decision making process definitely impacts negatively on the business.

4. Too many people focusing on one task

The process of attaining all of business tasks becomes much longer if everyone is focusing on just one task at time. When people work individually everyone will have the chance to concentrate on their job and finish it as soon as possible and this is not the case with task groups. A lot of effort is put into achieving on particular task by task groups which makes production a bit slow.

5. Tasks groups are time consuming

Yes task groups are time consuming, to start with, creating the group is such a long procedure and a lot of effort is needed to monitor the entire group to find out if they are doing what is expected of them. Furthermore there is a lot of distraction that comes from working in groups since each member of the task group has their own mind it becomes very easy to lose track of what they are directed to do because they keep diverting their attention to other non-constructive businesses.

6. Social loafing

This is a situation in which one or members of a task group deliberately ignore their responsibilities since they don’t feel like they are responsible for what happens in a group where there are so many members. Social loafing is very dangerous to the business reason being it makes the group ineffective as members concentrate more on observing each other’s performance instead of working towards achieving their intended goal. The sense of being accountable or responsible for a certain task doesn’t exist when members work in larger groups.

7. Incompatibility

There are those members in the organization who practically prefer to work alone or with small groups of one or two people but simply cannot perform if placed in very large groups like task groups. This therefore leaves a very big job to management as they have to be extremely as they create these groups to ensure that members are compatible and will be able to perform highly.

8. Low motivation

When people are always working in groups, they lack that motivation that will take them out of their comfort zone to take risks and make the business better. And this is because will always rely on the performance of a group and not the performance of an individual.

CHARACTERISTICS OF TASK GROUPS

If you don’t know what a task group should be like, below are some of the characteristics that every task group should have…….

• Short term objectives, task groups are usually formed in order to accomplish a task that will not take a very long period of time, they are out in place to handle the short term aims of an organization.
• Oriented towards problem solving, another really major reason for putting task groups in place is to aid management during the problem solving procedure. Any task group should be able to help management in the making of decisions that they are confident about.
• They usually handle complex tasks, when a tasks becomes too difficult for individuals, task groups are them put in place to find the solution to those overly complex tasks.
• The group must have diversity of skills so that different members are able to learn from one another.