ABSTRACT

Most work in organizations today is done by teams. A team is simply a group of people working together to accomplish a task, and there are many variations on this theme. In a new product development team at Boeing or Airbus, team members represent different functions such as basic engineering and production and work together over years in a highly interdependent way to develop and test a new product. In a sales team for Panasonic or Novartis, each salesperson has his or her own territory; team members interact with each other to share ideas and best practices and to work on a limited number of joint accounts. In a global auditing team at Ernst & Young or Deloitte, one auditor from each subsidiary’s country develops the accounts for that subsidiary and submits the accounts to a managing partner. The members of this large global audit team interact very little with each other. The managing partner then uses a small and representative “inner team” to bring together all the subsidiary accounts and create a single picture of the global client’s operations.