ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the definition of a team, how they form, how they work successfully and what causes them to be unsuccessful. Project groups, task groups or teams are a normal feature of the working life of managers and engineers, whether students or fully qualified professionals. If diversity is inevitable because of the employee mix of organisations, then perhaps the only useful idea to come out of the diversity research is that Tuckman's group development stages take longer in diverse groups. Steiner suggested that social loafing was most importantly effected by problems of coordination of individual effort within the groups and by group processes. Groups may fail to make rational or moral decisions because of the processes within the group; beware of conformance. In considering conformance, the chapter also looks at the work of Asch, Harvey, Janis, Zimbardo and Milgram.
