Team building - Definition and Overview

In Organizational development, whenever a team embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it engages in team building.

Assessing team effectiveness

To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:

• its current strengths as a team
• its current weaknesses

Improving team performance

To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:

• identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
• design any gap closure strategy

For further reading

• William G. Dyer, Team building: Current Issues and New Alternatives (3rd Edition). Pearson Education POD, 1995. ISBN 0201628821.

Sometimes the term "team building" (or "teambuilding") refers to the process of establishing specific groups to accomplish certain tasks in an organization. Among the ingredients that are critical to the successful set-up and launch of such team efforts are:

• goals and objectives
• timetables
• metrics
• training on how to work together

The morale of the team is an important variable and is often affected by such factors as:

• support
• resources
• communication
• personalities

As team performance reflects on management, managers should take part in constructing and fostering teams.

As with any activity, team building can be taken to extremes. For a notorious recent example of team building run amok, see Kamp Staaldraad.

See also

• cross-functional team
• list of human resource management topics

External links

• So You Wanna Be a Playa: Cooperative Games for Social Change (http://www.freechild.org/gamesguide.htm) - A free booklet of activities for teambuilding, problemsolving, and more.
• The Nasa Exercise: Lost on the Moon (http://nasa.perbang.dk) - On-line version of a widely used team building exercise for measuring team processes.
• Developing Teamwork (http://www.developingteamwork.com/cm.pl?cid=wp_team_building) - A video based learning package designed for organisations wishing to improve the effective use of the intellectual resource of their people. Available for review online free of charge.