Groups

Why Are Groups Used in Organizations?

Teams and groups are used for a variety of reasons, from brainstorming activities to problem solving issues to manufacturing products. Teams and groups are present in the floor shop as well as in the boardroom. They are used to perform surgery, fly planes, operate power plants, launch the space shuttle, drill for oil, and secure the peace of nations. But work teams and groups are mainly (not always) used when tasks are complex, difficult, and dynamic and where the consequences for errors are high. Also, work teams are best when redundancy is needed and the context in which they will perform is ill-defined as well as where team members have to process lots of information from different modalities. So the kinds of tasks teams or groups need to execute matter. The environment and the demands on team members matter.

And if errors are costly, they matter even more. In sum, work teams (and some groups) perform best and are needed when organizations have fluid environments typified by rapidly evolving and ambiguous situations, no right answers, information overload, intense time pressure, and severe consequences for error.

Teams

Many definitions of work teams have been advanced over the last two decades. Taken together, work teams are complex social and dynamic entities characterized by the following:

• there are two or more members;
• they hold meaningful task, goal, and feedback interdependencies;
• they interact routinely;
• they interact adaptively;
• they have a shared common and valued vision;
• they are hierarchically organized;
• they have a limited life span;
• they have expertise, roles, and functions that are distributed;
• they engage in cycles of performance; and
• they are embedded in an organizational environment that influences its processes and performance outcomes.

This definition is an umbrella for typifying the kind of teams found in industry, business, agencies, and the military.

Groups

Groups are in the same continua as teams, but usually workgroups have not ask interdependency and the expertise is not distributed. Work groups are loosely coupled social entities that are brought in to solve a specific problem or generate ideas about how to improve a situation, such as a task force or brainstorming group. Their life [Page 299]cycle is short and group members have no shared history or future. Of course, there are exceptions.

Is the distinction between these two entities important? Well, in practice it might not be. But in research, it is. To build the science of team performance, we must be clear on how research findings generalize, to what kind of team or group the results matter. Again, all work teams are not created equal and neither are groups.

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