Cohesion and teamwork

Abstract

Rugby has a fantastic bonding effect ... It brings friendships to the fore ... You get strong guys up front, quick guys in the back, you get poets, you get freemasons, everybody playing in the same team and it’s a fantastic culture. (Francois Pienaar, Captain, South Africa, World Cup Winners 1995). As the quote used to introduce this chapter illustrates, team unity (or team cohesion) can generate strong emotions among team members. But, as anyone who has been a captain, manager, player, or observer of rugby can testify, achieving team unity and getting a team to work together to achieve its collective goals can be difficult. Individual team members sometimes have personal goals and aspirations that bring them into conflict with the team’s goals and objectives. As a consequence, those individuals may try to pull the team in different directions. Or, teammates may dislike each other with the resulting consequence that communication on and off the pitch becomes poor or nonexistent. Or, teammates may like each other so much that a considerable amount of effort is expended to insure that harmony is preserved—at the expense of honest appraisal, accurate feedback and open communication. Observations by Pat Riley (1993), a very successful North American professional coach, help to illustrate how difficult it is to obtain teamwork. As Riley noted, Teamwork isn’t simple. In fact, it can be a frustrating elusive commodity… teamwork doesn’t appear magically, just because someone mouths the words. It doesn’t thrive because of the presence of talent or ambition. It doesn’t flourish simply because a team has tasted success. (p.16) So what steps can team leaders/coaches take to ensure that a team is actively working to become more unified and cohesive? In the present chapter, we focus on four strategies that have been used successfully in sport teams: team performance profiling, team goal setting, a gameplan exercise to develop role clarity and role acceptance, and an exercise to promote mutual respect.