<p>The main aim of this study was to test and ascertain, objectively, theexistence/occurrence of the phenomenon of Synergy in teams. To do this, the results of anonline course in Umea University, where students are invariably required to do a bunch ofindividual as well as team assignments, were analysed: the idea was to compare the marksobtained by the students in their team assignments with their marks in their individualassignments and to check if there was a reasonably good number of instances where the teammark was higher than the highest individual mark in that particular team. The basicassumption was that in case the team mark of a team was higher than the highest individualmark in that team, then, it can be presumed that synergy has taken place in that team for thatparticular team assignment. And, given a reasonably large sample of teams, it would beinstructive to see what percentage of groups/teams actually show synergy. In case a goodnumber of teams show such results then we could conclude that there was objective evidencein favour of the synergy. In case our analysis brought to fore such results then it would benatural to take the study one step ahead and test a broad causal relationship of synergy withthe complexity/difficulty of task at hand.After analysing the results of about 387 students, who worked in about 104 teams, itwas found that about 69.23% teams scored higher than the highest scoring individual; 93.26%teams faired better than the average score of team members; and, 98.07% teams can be said tohave performed better if compared to the lowest individual score.Further, one level below, when team-score and individual-score were compared acrossdifferent team and individual tasks (Case Studies), it still came to fore that teams hadoutperformed the individuals. And, when a single student’s marks in his team assignmentswere compared with his marks in his individual assignments, in five out of six comparisons itwas found that the team mark was convincingly higher than the individual mark.All these results strongly indicated the existence/occurrence of synergy in teams.In addition to this, an experiment on two teams of students was also performed toshow that synergy was more likely to happen if the task at hand was complex/ difficult. Theresults of this experiment seemed to corroborate the contention of the researchers.Keywords: Project Management, Team, Team Work, Individual work, Synergy</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA/oai:DiVA.org:umu-18370 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Kirmani, Farooq, Akdemir, Fahri |
| Publisher | Umeå University, Umeå School of Business, Umeå University, Umeå School of Business |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, text |
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