Team Building: Proven Strategies for Improving Team Performance, Fourth Edition

Introduction

This book is for anyone concerned about effective team performance. Three previous editions of Team Building have been well received by managers, team leaders, and team consultants. In fact, roughly 100,000 copies have been sold in several languages over the almost three decades since our father, William G. “Bill” Dyer, wrote the first edition, making it one of the most widely read books on the subject. Bill was the consummate social scientist, trained in sociology at the University of Wisconsin after World War II. He had grown up in a rather large family of seven children (one was his half-brother Jack Gibb, another prominent social scientist) in a rather poor section of Portland, Oregon. Bill’s father ran a small grocery store attached to their home, and it was there that Bill learned the importance of hard work, and teamwork, as he worked in the family store. From these experiences he also recognized that education was the key to his future.

After finishing his doctorate at Wisconsin, Bill and his wife, Bonnie, moved on to Iowa State University and shortly thereafter to Brigham Young University. His early research studies in the 1950s were on family dynamics and role conflict within families. In the late 1950s Bill was introduced by his brother Jack Gibb into the world of “T-groups” (the T stood for “training”), which at the time were largely sponsored by National Training Laboratories (NTL). The assumption underlying the T-group was that individuals—and particularly ...