ABSTRACT
According to many organizational analysts, the success of an organization can depend on the levels of teamwork it employs: ‘Teams have a great deal of potential to contribute to modern organizational life. Positive working teams encourage flexibility, involvement and efficiency and the introduction of teamworking has been known to transform companies entirely’ (Hayes, 1997, p. 25). Some writers have gone even further and suggested that teams will be the ‘primary building blocks of company performance in the organization of the future’ (Katzenbach and Smith, 1998, p. 173). Certainly, many companies worldwide have invested in team training for staff. For example, the majority of ‘top trainers’ in the UK use the model of team roles explained in this chapter (according to Belbin, 2000). Stewart et al. (1999, p. 7) claim that ‘nearly every major US company is currently trying or considering some form of empowered work teams somewhere in the organization’.
