Making the Team: A Guide for Managers

What Is a Team?

Not everyone who works together or in close proximity belongs to a team. A team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources, and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal. As is summarized in Box 1-1, teams have five key defining characteristics. First, teams exist to achieve a shared goal. Simply put, teams have work to do. Teams produce outcomes for which members have collective responsibility and reap some form of collective reward. Second, team members are interdependent regarding some common goal. Interdependence is the hallmark of teamwork. Interdependence means that team members cannot achieve their goals single-handedly, but instead, must rely on each other ...