Final answer:
The best practices for creating high-performing project teams are ensuring team members understand their importance, selecting leaders who promote cooperation and trust, breaking large teams into smaller ones, ensuring member commitment, facilitating effective communication, and maintaining a mix of diverse viewpoints. This can lead to improved efficiency, decision-making, and overall team success.
Step-by-step explanation:
The best practices for creating high-performance project teams, as identified in research, include several key elements. First, helping the team members understand the importance of their team and picking team leaders who foster cooperation and trust are crucial for team dynamics and performance. Second, breaking the overall project group into smaller teams, typically with fewer than 10 members, is beneficial as it can promote efficiency and more effective communication. Third, ensuring that team members are genuinely committed to the tasks at hand can greatly enhance team performance, and using volunteers can sometimes be a good strategy to boost this commitment.
Effective team communication and good negotiation skills are essential to advance collaborative projects and prevent or manage disputes and conflicts. Open, forthcoming, and transparent communication is particularly important, as is avoiding over-delivering which can lead to unrealistic expectations or burnout.
To mitigate issues such as social loafing, poor decision-making due to conformity effects, conflict within the group, and the team halo effect, it is important to employ strategies that encourage individual accountability and the consideration of diverse viewpoints. This might include private voting, outside opinions, and a balanced approach to team diversity, such as a gender mix that has been shown to improve team performance.