ABSTRACT
Contemporary organizations in Western societies have radically redesigned jobs in a way that places increased emphasis on people working together as part of a team. This trend can be traced to many historical developments that occurred in industrialized nations during the 1980s and 1990s that increased the collaboration requirements for workers at all levels. Organizations moving to team-based structure are finding that creating the right balance between effective and timely collaboration, on the one hand, with the ability to still execute one’s primary job, on the other hand, is easy to mishandle. Teams are a special type of group that, in addition to these properties, also possess some degree of skill differentiation, authority differentiation, and temporal stability. Functional work groups help integrate and coordinate employees who perform similar tasks. Employees in such groups can exchange information about task procedures, sharpening their knowledge and skills.
