Abstract
This research describes and evaluates how a finance training exercise led to readily identifiable team building among the participants in an executive development workshop initially targeted as a “Finance for the Non-Financial Executive “program. The finance exercise required the participants to make financial/operational tradeoffs in their own section of the firm in order to
improve the return on assets for the corporation at large. The finance training workshop is used as a case study to provide observed behavioral inputs to evaluate and confirm that the finance training led to the team building. In order to confirm the emergence of team building, a collection of 12 published articles and texts on the subject of team building were reviewed and a master table was compiled containing all the authors’ named team characteristics. The workshop participant groups were observed and their individual and group behavior was compared to the team characteristics listed in the table. Their behavior matched all but two of the team characteristics listed in the lengthy table. Our conclusion was that the participant groups had, indeed, formed themselves into effective teams to accomplish their task of evaluating the financial/operational tradeoffs required to improve the return on assets for their firm. Their finance training led to team building.