ABSTRACT
Teams or groups involve people with diverse expertise and backgrounds bringing their knowledge, skills, and experience to bear on problems and projects. Note that there is a difference between a team and a group. The term team suggests collaboration, indeed a tight, working relationship in which members depend on each other to achieve a set of goals or level of performance. A group is merely two or more individuals who are not necessarily mutually dependent. Often, team members work together in the same office, or can easily come together for periodic meetings, even if some travel is involved. The team members are sometimes separated by wide geographic distances, and other modes of meeting and communicating may be necessary instead of meeting face-to-face and in person; examples are teleconferences, conference telephone calls, email, Internet chat rooms, and combinations thereof. The team members may come together for short periods of time in order to accomplish specific, limited tasks, such as selecting a new CEO or designing a new data system. In other cases, the team may be responsible for an ongoing process or function, such as advertising a product or worldwide distribution of a product. The complexity of these tasks requires that the team members work interdependently. The importance of these tasks requires that members share responsibility for the work and the accountability for meeting the organization’s performance goals. Effective teams should have their own goals, criteria for success, and means of evaluation. Methods to facilitate team interaction about these goals, the team process, and success tracking will enhance team performance and effectiveness.
