Managing Teams

Ninety-one percent of organizations are significantly improving their effectiveness by using work teams. Work teams consist of a small number of people with complementary skills who hold themselves mutually accountable for pursuing a common purpose, achieving performance goals, and improving interdependent work processes.

By this definition, computer programmers working on separate projects in the same department of a company would not be considered a team. To be a team, the programmers would have to be interdependent and share responsibility and accountability for the quality and amount of computer code they produced.

Teams have significant advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, the question is not whether to use teams, but when and where to use teams for maximum benefit and minimum cost. If the type of reward (individual versus team) is not matched to the type of performance (individual versus team), teams won’t work.