Teams are being introduced worldwide as a means to increase productivity

Teams are being introduced worldwide as a means to increase productivity, quality, and employee job satisfaction. In this chapter, we will describe various types of teams, some of the problems teams can create, and what management can do to increase the likelihood that teams in their organization will be high-performing.

Our current understanding of teams builds on a half-century of research on work groups. So let's begin this chapter by contrasting groups and teams and providing a brief review of basic group concepts.

Groups Versus Teams

Groups and teams are not the same thing. A group is two or more individuals, inter- acting and interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular objectives. A work group is a group who interact primarily to share information and to make decisions to help each other perform within their separate areas of responsibility.

Work groups have no need or opportunity to engage in collective work that requires joint effort. So their performance is merely the summation of all the group members' individual contributions. There is no positive synergy that would create an overall level of performance that is greater than the sum of the inputs.

A work team generates positive synergy through coordinated effort. Their individual efforts result in a level of performance that is greater than the sum of those individual inputs. Exhibit 10-1 highlights the differences between work groups and work teams.

These definitions help clarify why so many organizations have recently restructured work processes around teams. Management is looking for that positive synergy that will allow their organization to increase performance. The extensive use of teams creates the potential for an organization to generate greater outputs with no increase in inputs. Note, however, we said "potential." There is nothing inherently magical in the creation of teams that assures the achievement of this positive synergy. Merely calling a group a team does not automatically increase its performance. As we'll show later in this chapter, successful or high-performing teams have certain common