A team is a group of people who collaborate toward a common goal.

Collaborative Teams in the Workplace

Sports teams are a good example of how teams work. For instance, a basketball team has individual players who each contribute toward the goal of winning a game. Similarly, in business settings most work is accomplished by teams of individuals who collaborate on activities with defined outcomes. Because teams are so prevalent in business organizations, it is important for employees to have the skills necessary to work effectively with others.

Organizations typically have many teams, and an individual is frequently a member of more than one team. Some teams are permanent and are responsible for ongoing activities. For instance, a team of nurses in a maternity ward provides medical services to new mothers. While patients come and go, the tasks involved in providing care remain stable. In other cases a team is formed for a temporary purpose: these are called project teams and have a defined beginning and end point linked to achieving a particular one-time goal.

The Purpose of Teams

Organizations form teams to accomplish tasks that are too large or complex for an individual to complete. Teams are also effective for work that requires different types of skills and expertise. For example, the development of new products involves understanding customer needs as well as how to design and build a product that will meet these needs. Accordingly, a new product-development team would include people with customer knowledge as well as designers and engineers.

Characteristics of Effective Teamwork

An effective team accomplishes its goals in a way that meets the standards set by those who evaluate its performance. For instance, a team may have a goal of delivering a new product within six months on a budget of $100,000. Even if the team finishes the project on time, it can be considered effective only if it stayed within its expected budget.

Effective teamwork requires certain conditions to be in place that will increase the likelihood that each member’s contributions—and the effort of the group as a whole—will lead to success. Effective teams share five characteristics:

• Shared values: a common set of beliefs and principles about how and why the team members will work together
• Mutual trust: confidence between team members that each puts the best interest of the team ahead of individual priorities
• Inspiring vision: a clear direction that motivates commitment to a collective effort
• Skill/talent: the combined abilities and expertise to accomplish the required tasks and work productively with others
• Rewards: recognition of achievement toward objectives and reinforcement of behavior that supports the team’s work

Effective teamwork requires that people work as a cohesive unit. These five characteristics can help individuals collaborate with others by focusing their efforts in a common direction and achieving an outcome that can only be reached by working together.

Team Processes

When considering the role of a team, it’s important to understand the various processes that teams will carry out over time. At the beginning of a team set up (or when redirecting the efforts of a team), a transitional process is carried out. Once the team has set strategic goals, they can begin progressing towards the completion of those goals operationally. The final team process is one of interpersonal efficiency, or refining the team dynamic for efficiency and success. More specifically, these processes can be described as follows:

Transitional Process

• Mission analysis
• Goal specification
• Strategy formulation

Action Process

• Monitoring progress toward goals
• Systems monitoring
• Team monitoring and backup behavior
• Coordination

Interpersonal Process

• Conflict management
• Motivation and confidence building
• Affect management

The primary benefit of teamwork is that it allows an organization to achieve something that an individual working alone cannot. This advantage arises from several factors, each of which accounts for a different aspect of the overall benefit of teams.

Team Roles

Benefits of Collaborative Teamwork

Teamwork creates outcomes that make better use of resources and produce richer ideas.

• Higher efficiency: Since teams combine the efforts of individuals, they can accomplish more than an individual working alone.
• Faster speed: Because teams draw on the efforts of many contributors, they can often complete tasks and activities in less time.
• More thoughtful ideas: Each person who works on a problem or set of tasks may bring different information and knowledge to bear, which can result in solutions and approaches an individual would not have identified.
• Greater effectiveness: When people coordinate their efforts, they can divide up roles and tasks to more thoroughly address an issue. For example, in hospital settings teamwork has been found to increase patient safety more than when only individual efforts are made to avoid mishaps.
• Mutual support: Because team members can rely on other people with shared goals, they can receive assistance and encouragement as they work on tasks. Such support can encourage people to achieve goals they may not have had the confidence to have reached on their own.
• Greater sense of accomplishment: When members of a team collaborate and take collective responsibility for outcomes, they can feel a greater sense of accomplishment when they achieve a goal they could not have achieved if they had worked by themselves.

The total value created by teamwork depends on the overall effectiveness of the team effort. While we might consider simply achieving a goal as being a benefit of teamwork, by taking advantage of what teamwork has to offer, an organization can gain a broader set of benefits. Read an interesting blog post about The Importance of Collaboration in the Workplace^[1] to learn about the benefits that teamwork and collaboration offer, not only to an organization, but also to an individual who is collaborating on a team.