ABSTRACT

In recent years, managers have come to realize the importance of teams and of team attitudes, roles, and responsibilities to the productivity and efficiency of organizations. While team training has been applied to improve team competencies and processes, other methods can be applied to focus more on team affect and interpersonal relations. One supplement to team training is team building, an intervention designed to improve team functioning. Specifically, team building seeks to enhance team processes, improve individual and team characteristics, and alter organizational environments and structures (Tannenbaum et al., 1992). In this intervention, “intact work groups experientially learn, by examining their structures, purposes, norms, values, and interpersonal dynamics, to increase their skills for effective teamwork” (Liebowitz and De Meuse, 1982). Team building differs from other team training efforts in that it specifically seeks to clarify team member roles and responsibilities (Salas et al., 1999) in addition to focusing on the improvement of core team operations and processes.