What is the difference between groups and teams? Teams have extra features such as complementary skills, and whilst both have common goals or purposes, teams also hold themselves collectively accountable for that purpose.

Organisations today have an increased emphasis on teams and teamwork. With this emphasis comes a host of associated benefits and challenges. Team building, a sequence of planned action steps, is used to analyse the effectiveness of a group and to implement changes to increase its operating effectiveness. Teamwork occurs only when team leaders and members have found ways to work together towards shared goals. It is attained through effective team leaders who must have the competencies to build trust, support team decisions, expand team capabilities, create team identity, utilise differences, and foresee and implement change. Team consensus is vital and attained through methods such as brainstorming and effective facilitation by trained leaders and consultants. Common team-building methods include formal retreats, continuous improvement and outdoor experience approaches. Team building goals, in addition to its emphasis on improving teamwork and group effectiveness, include: clarifying core values to guide and direct the behaviour of members, transforming a broad sense of purpose into specific performance objectives, developing the right mix of skills to accomplish high-performance results, and enhancing creativity in task performance.

People are required to fulfil certain roles in groups, though role ambiguity and role conflict frequently complicate their behavioural patterns. Group norms, ideas or beliefs about standards of behaviour in a group, develop as members interact with one another. They may take both positive and negative forms, and impact such areas as social behaviours, performance, relationships with colleagues and personal development. Members of cohesive groups are highly motivated to remain part of the group, and thus tend to adhere more closely to the group’s norms. High cohesiveness can have positive performance effects but there may be particularly negative effects when it is associated with low performance norms. The manager’s job is to foster groups with both positive performance norms and high cohesiveness.

The emphasis on employee participation in the workplace has given rise to innovative directions in work group designs. Employee involvement groups are giving individuals more influence over general workplace issues and decisions. They are teams of workers who meet regularly outside their normal work units for the purpose of collectively addressing important workplace issues. Quality circles, originally developed in Japan, involve employees who meet periodically to discuss and develop innovative solutions for production problems related to quality, production or cost. Task forces are temporary teams created to fulfil a well-defined task within a fairly short period of time. Self-managing work teams are small groups of people empowered to make decisions in areas such as work pace, scheduling, and even performance evaluation.

Self-managing work teams have many benefits including improved productivity and quality, faster response to technological change, increased production flexibility, flatter structures, improved worker attitudes and lower absenteeism and turnover. However, there can be down-sides to such teams including questionable results, time used in team planning and problem solving, and a reliance on managing at a level of status quo rather than leading to future growth and performance.

As managers continue to look for creative ways to utilise teams, the principles of empowerment, participation, involvement and collaboration will continue to gain importance. The principle of empowerment, for instance, is upheld through a new technology that provides software to support various team activities. As more organisations move to self-managed teams, the question of accountability will be of increasing importance to managers, as will the issue of trust in virtual teams.

Organisations are collections of people working together through divisions of labour to achieve a common purpose. They exist because individuals are limited in their physical and mental capabilities and through the vehicle of ‘organisation’ they can combine their efforts and work together to achieve more than they could alone. Organisational behaviour is the study of individuals and groups in organisations. Managers need to understand it since they must manage the people within their organisations. Managers know that success in a highly dynamic environment will be achieved by active opportunity seekers and problem solvers. OB helps managers to analyse workplace experiences, to know what to look for in situations, to understand what they find and to take (or help others to take) the required action.