The Role of Emotions in Building Effective Teams

Team performance is a function of collective energy. This force is represented by a different sentiment of each member. A negative emotion always pulls the overall power of the team down. Thus, it is important that managers keep a watch on the emotional health of the team to achieve superlative performance. The warmth factor in the team is of utmost importance. The problem is managers rely only on competence as a strategy to achieve results. Excessive focus on competence creates rivalry within the team, which creates negative emotions. Typical feelings that bring performance levels down are frustration, anger, boredom, jealousy, fear, etc.

These emotions must be transformed into happiness, which triggers creative forces within the team. Fear, for long, has been used as a strategy to derive performance but it has failed to deliver any outcomes. Emotional engagement with the manager has a correlation to the employee’s engagement with the organization. Thus, it becomes important to select managers carefully. Disengagement in the team is mostly an outcome of poor relationships with the manager.

Performance enhancement thus, is a function of competence building within the team, along with a focus on building positive emotions within the group. Some aspects of building good emotions and deriving illustrious performance are indicated below:

• Focus on creation of trust and creative collaboration in the team. Always concentrate on building informal networks. Too much of formal conversation and e-mails deteriorates energy levels and engagements.
• Focus on attitudes and motives of members. Immoral motives will always annihilate the engagement levels.
• Clean the team on toxic employees consistently; they create noise and bring energy.
• Focus on results. Winning teams are always highly engaged.
• Critical feedback and appreciation must go hand in hand.
• Build relationships by spending time informally.
• Projects must be managed in an agile, collaborative style and not in sluggish formal
• pockets. All members must work creatively with managerial control at the lowest level.
• Speed always engages. It challenges teams to deliver fast.

If teams collaborate with right motives and have soaring energy levels, success is guaranteed. Organizations must focus on creating emotionally engaged teams and engaged managers. Be watchful of the emotional health of the team. Performance is always a by-product then.