ABSTRACT
The use of teams has increased dramatically in response to competitive pressures for speed, costs, quality, and innovation. For example, 82% of companies with 100 or more employees report that they use teams (Gordon, 1992). Seventy-nine percent of Fortune 1000 companies reported that they used self-managing work teams and 94% reported that they used employee participation groups in 1996 compared to 28% and 70% respectively in 1987 (Lawler, 1998). This growth in the use of teams has meant that organizations have provided consultants with myriad opportunities to help them increase team effectiveness. Many books have been written for the practitioner. For example, authors have written on increasing the effectiveness of self-managing work teams (Wellins, Byham, and Wilson, 1991; Orsburn et al., 1990), cross-functional project teams (Parker, 1994), parallel learning teams (Bushe and Shani, 1991), and executive teams (Katzenbach, 1998). Other books have examined the design of team-based organizations (Mohrman et al, 1995) and the need for organizational systems to support team effectiveness (Sundstrom et al., 1999).
