Question

The head of emergency services in a large metropolitan city strongly believes that heterogeneous (or diverse) teams are more effective than homogeneous (or similar) teams. He wants to put this into practice by selecting highly skilled people with diverse demographics, backgrounds and experiences on ambulance and other emergency service teams. Consider the class material and reading on team dynamics when answering the following. a) What would be the advantages and disadvantages of this decision regarding how the team members would work together and get their job done? In your opinion, do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? b) After a year on the job, he decided to frequently rotate the members on these teams so that the members constantly have new/different people to work with. How do you see this impacting the effectiveness of their work and why?

Answer 1

a) Homogeneous Team means that people from similar background like caste, religion, race, age, place, etc., formed a team and working together.

Heterogeneous Team means people from different background in terms of caste, religion, race, experiance, skills, etc.,work together for particular work.

Advantage of Heterogeneous Team

Flow of Multiple talent coupled with creativity, skills, knowledge and ideas. There are more chances of new ideas and new way of doing the same work. Each person can see the competition among each other and work together in harmony.

Disadvantage

When diversified people work together there can be a problem of miss commuincation and attitude. There are more chances of mis understanding. There can be issues of language and minority. People may feel isolated and under partial.

Yes benefits are more and disadvantages can be managed through proper integration and guidance towards healthy work atmosphere which is a duty and function of team leader.

b) Rotation will encourage the team members to pass on the same experiance and sense of learning to the new team member. Afterall, change is always good in one or other way round.

Fresh eyes will be watching the work done and progress made. He may be having the more good ideas than the existing members and can check the mistakes, if any done as other employees become habitual of the same tasks by then.

This would be learning for team members too to change the project overtime and get something new to keep their interest impact.