Dysfunctions of a Team- Patrick Lencioni Bhavya Seth - 0568958 Trang Nguyen - 0567279 Kevin Baker - 0568890 MGT 210 Professor: Shane McQuade Golden Gate University

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I. Introduction Team work has become a core competence in many organizations such as Whole Food, IDEO, or Cisco. A team is defined as “a group whose members work intensely with one another to achieve a specific common goal or objective” (Jones and George, 2011, p.495). One of the main reasons why team work is more preferable nowadays is that the organization wants to take advantage of synergies. For example, many teams lack cohesion in which team members do not consider themselves as part of a team. Some teams have to suffer from social loafing which means that team members do not contribute or get involved in the project as they do when working independently. Other teams are face with the problems of shared goals as team members pursue their individual goals rather than trying to achieve the team’s goal. Groupthink is another concern of team leaders because the team consider consensus as a primary goal. Consequently, they do not want to get involved into the debate and this may undermine team performance. All of these above problems are characteristic of a dysfunctional team. In fact, teams are made up of imperfect human beings which means teams are inherently dysfunctional and that decreases team performance. Organizations fail to achieve teamwork because they unknowingly fall prey to five natural but dangerous pitfalls- they are known as the 5 dysfunctions of a team. II. Summary Lencioni (2002) points out that there are five dysfunctions of a team. The first dysfunction is an absence of trust among team members. This happens when team members are not very open with one another regarding their strengths and weaknesses. The second dysfunction is fear of conflict which is the result of absence of