Team Spirit: A Fun and Interactive Simulation of Teamwork and Effective Leadership (Essential Resources for Training and Hr Professionals)

Team Spirit offers facilitators a fun-to-play, interactive learning simulation that challenges participants to collaborate, communicate, and enhance group dynamics, as teams work to solve a fictional but realistic problem.

This experiential exercise clearly demonstrates that it takes many different talents to achieve a team goal. Team Spirit also shows how formal and informal leadership styles can influence a team's performance. As with any group-based learning activity, Team Spirit serves as a vehicle to generate candid dialogue and offers groups the chance to build on best practices in team effectiveness. While solving the simulation puzzle through a structured group and a group-wide debriefing process, participants will:

• Reflect on various group and leader dynamics occurring during the process 
  
• Explore how these dynamics apply to their everyday work or educational environments
  
• Identify enhanced strategies that support their roles as team members or leaders and consider which ones they will adopt at work
  

This Team Spirit package offers everything learning professionals need to conduct the engaging simulation, including preparation directions and instructions for running and debriefing the activity. The appendixes contain the matrix puzzles and solutions, trivia questions and answers, two electronic optional questionnaires, and masters for all the game pieces, including the puzzle tiles and clues. The companion CD-ROM includes copies of all the appendix material.

Team Spirit has been developed andproven effectivewith a wide range of teams from many different organizations. It is sure add a dose of creativity, flair, and fun to your training and development repertoire.

About the Author

Charles Petranek, Ph.D., is professor of sociology at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville. He has used experiential learning in all of his classes and has designed social simulations for the classes of Marriage and Family, Sociology of Death, and Dying and Social Psychology. He has earned the Teacher of the Year Award twice and the Distinguished Professor Award once.

Randy Hollandsworth, Ph.D., is an instructor and program director for Athens Technical College, Athens, Georgia in management and supervisory development. In addition, hemanaged e-learning for American Freightways, Inc. (Fed Ex Freight East). He has also served as director for the Center for Leadership and Professional Development for Radford University, Radford, Virginia.