ABSTRACT
Teams include individuals having different skills that when put together help accomplish the desired output, and this constitutes the discussion of the chapter on Team and Teamwork. A team is characterized by clarity in the goals and objectives, situational leadership, decisions taken by consensus, valued diversity, and continuous self-assessment for efficiency and productivity. The chapter draws a comparison between teams and groups and states that effective management of teams encompasses the idea generation and implementation and control by the manager as well as members to achieve the objective where there is a distribution of responsibility that is not found within groups. The chapter then elaborates on the benefits of teamwork from the individual and organizational perspective and enumerates examples of classification of teams based on the nature of management, period of existence, and also the nature of work. Ideally, an organizational goal enables the team members to commonly reach a consensus on performance, a set of strategies to be devised and incorporated to attain the performance of individual units, summing up to the organization's performance on the whole. At each instance, the top management is kept in the loop for its inputs and implementation of new ideas, as required. The various reasons for a team's failure and underperformance of teams (as reported by McKinsey) are aptly described in this chapter, and the approach followed to create effective teams and their outcomes are discussed using case studies.
