Outdoor team building Activities

Outdoor team building activity is such an activity by which a group of people get together and finish a task. Outdoor team building interventions have proven to have positive effects on cognitive, affective, process, and performance team outcomes. Outdoor team building has seen the strongest effect on effective and process outcomes. According to Klein et al. (2009), outdoor amazing race sydney is one of the most widely used group development interventions in organizations today. Among all organizational interventions, outdoor team building interventions were found to have the largest effects on financial measures of organizational performance. Recent meta-analyses show that outdoor team development activities, including team building and team training, improve both a team’s objective performance and supervisory subjective ratings on performance.The most effective outdoor team building efforts occur when members of the team are highly interdependent in performing the task, highly knowledgeable and experienced in the task to be accomplished, and when organizational leadership actively establishes and supports the super teams. 

Effective team building must also incorporate an awareness of the ultimate objective of the task. They must work to develop goals, roles and procedures to achieve it successfully. In addition to task-orientated team building efforts, team-building efforts must also be relationship oriented. To ensure effectiveness, outdoor team building should work towards the establishment of policies and procedures and working with the environment, including support systems. Caveats to team building effectiveness is that team building as an intervention is designed to work when the members of the team are actually involved in solving the problem and when they are already intact as a team to be able to problem solve. The members of the team must have the willingness and ability to speak up about their needs.Team building is a specific team development intervention that has been scientifically proven to positively affect team effectiveness, when exerted with its intended purpose. Team building is aimed at specific needs, and thus has been proven to have specific outcomes on teams. Based on the research conducted by Klein et al. (2009), goal setting and role clarification were shown to have strongest impact on cognitive, affective, process and performance outcomes. However, they had the most powerful impact on affective and process outcomes. 

This implies that team building can help benefit teams experiencing issues with negative affect, such as lack of cohesion or trust. It could also improve teams suffering from process issues, such as lack of clarification in roles. Although the four approaches were useful in enhancing team functioning, goal setting and role clarification have proven to be the most impactful. This is because, drawing upon theory, providing teams with clearly set and challenging goals enhances motivation to work harder to be more effective and reduces conflict. Role clarification helps to set individual purposes, goals and motivation. Finally, larger team sizes (those with 10 or more members) appeared to benefit the most from team building activities sydney interventions. That is because larger teams generally have a greater reservoir of cognitive resources and capabilities than smaller teams. The following table provides the main results of the effect of team building strategies on cognitive, affective, process, and performance team outcomes.