From Group-Work to Teamwork

This short report is essential for leading your team to overcome the three most common challenges of working in groups: social loafing, coordination loss, and symbolic participation. These problems affect most organizations (and most likely your team, too) so that your results are much less than they should be. The authors summarize the most important principles of using teams in the workplace. The use of groups and teams in the American workplace is growing, and effective teamwork has been associated with major performance gains and increased innovation. Alongside the stories of successful teams, however, is another less popular story. Teamwork is hard. Teamwork is complex because it requires team members to manage multiple relationships while efficiently dividing and coordinating tasks. When relationships or team processes break down, group-work can easily harm organizations more than they help. The good news is that the popularity of team work has inspired a plethora of research into forming more effective groups and teams. As a result, we now know more than ever about avoiding the pitfalls of poorly planned teamwork. We also have access to an array of innovative solutions which have been proven to increase the power of our teams in the workplace. The goal of this easy-to-use report is to simplify and summarize the most important principals of using teams in the workplace. It provides a brief overview of the factors that affect team performance and the most common challenges that groups face when they come together. You, too, can cultivate high-functioning workplace groups whose efforts consistently achieve more. Use the included research-based assessment tools to identify what is holding your team back and direct your attention to the most important areas. The largest section of this report focuses on practical solutions--news you can use--for turning your work group into a coordinated, communicative, successful team.