Cultural Dynamism: Reimaging Team Building That Transcend Reflexive Individual Biography in a Post-Segregated Environment

In the Southern African context,businesses,governments,and community-based organizations have become reliant on teamwork to streamline processes,augment participation and improve performance.In this regard,the historically formalized,centralized,and departmentalized mechanistic structures are being replaced by team-based structures.Research from the North,on team building,suggests that teams have a potential to give diversity in knowledge,attitudes,skills,and experience,whose integration would make it possible to offer rapid,flexible and innovative responses to problems and challenges,promoting performance and improving the satisfaction of those making the team.In South Africa,a state-owned entity launched a team-building initiative to improve team effectiveness and functioning within the water sector.This initiative was implemented contemporaneously with climate and culture change management initiatives envisioned to usher in a new culture,to improve employee morale,and,ultimately,to ensure a high-performing organization.These initiatives sought to help articulate and cultivate leadership accord,create a common vision,as well as develop a consensus on a set of collective values that would become the bedrock of the organization.In the light of this background,this paper examines the effectiveness of the“growing-our-teams”initiative,with the goal of lending insights into the strengths and weaknesses of strategies and processes deployed to implement and manage the initiative.In assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the program,the underpinning research was conducted by reviewing and analyzing related articles and papers,as well as interrogating employee experiences relating to the program.How do state-owned entities learn and implement lessons distilled from their programs or initiatives to build capacity and improve efficiencies?

Humanizing the Culture of Technology Teams: Strategies for Creating Healthier and More Productive Work Environments

With the advancement of technology, companies are increasingly dependent on technology teams to stay competitive. However, members of these teams often work in stressful and unhealthy environments, which can undermine their productivity and well-being. The humanization of the culture of technology teams is an approach that aims to create healthier and more productive work environments for team members, promoting balance between personal and professional life. Despite the importance of a healthy and productive work environment, many companies do not invest in strategies to humanize the culture of their technology teams. This can lead to high levels of stress, staff turnover and low productivity. The objective of this project is to identify effective strategies to humanize the culture of technology teams and create healthier and more productive work environments in digital companies. For this, factors such as management styles, psychological safety, human-centered development, individual beliefs and time and energy management will be analyzed. The project’s methodology will include a literature review on the subject and qualitative data analysis will be performed using a content analysis approach. This project will contribute to the advancement of knowledge about the humanization of the culture of technology teams in digital companies. The results can be applied to companies that want to create healthier and more productive work environments for their team members.

OVERVIEW OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS IN SPORT

The complex systems approach offers an opportunity to replace the extant pre-dominant mechanistic view on sport-related phenomena.The emphasis on the environment-system relationship,the applications of complexity principles,and the use of nonlinear dynamics mathematical tools propose a deep change in sport science.Coordination dynamics,ecological dynamics,and network approaches have been successfully applied to the study of different sport-related behaviors,from movement patterns that emerge at different scales constrained by specific sport contexts to game dynamics.Sport benefit from the use of such approaches in the understanding of technical,tactical,or physical conditioning aspects which change their meaning and dilute their frontiers.The creation of new learning and training strategies for teams and individual athletes is a main practical consequence.Some challenges for the future are investigating the influence of key control parameters in the nonlinear behavior of athlete-environment systems and the possible relatedness of the dynamics and constraints acting at different spatio-temporal scales in team sports.Modelling sport-related phenomena can make useful contributions to a better understanding of complex systems and vice-versa.