If teams are to live up to their promise and be more than the sum of the parts, they must be able to achieve more than individuals working on their own. So team achievements might be difficult or impossible to achieve by the boss alone or other individual efforts alone. A successful team achieves synergy, which occurs when people together create new alternatives and solutions that are better than their individual efforts.

How to build a team so that we can lead it effectively? What are teams and what
are the types of teams? How do they emerge and develop? Building a team is not an easy task, but is important whenever the task requires more than one person. At least two people or more have to be organized, cooperate with each other, be coordinated, and collaborate in their activities in order to attain the organizational goals. Therefore, it could be said that team building involves combining and integrating the talents, skills and energy of individual employees to form them into a team. Then, they will need to work on solving problems and accomplishing the goals and objectives. If teams are to live up to their promise and be more than the sum of the parts, they must be able to achieve more than individuals working on their own. So team achievements might be difficult or impossible to achieve by the boss alone or other individual efforts alone.

What is the difference between a team and a group? In what ways are they different? We have to distinguish here between the meanings of the words ‘team’ and ‘group.’ “A team is a small number of employees with competencies (abilities, skills and knowledge) who are committed to common performance, goals and working relationships for which they hold themselves mutually accountable” (Hellriegel and Slocum, 2004, p. 194, Organisational Behavior), whereas a group is defined by “any number of people who share goals, often communicate with one another over a period of time, and are few enough so that each individual may communicate with all the others, person to person” (Hellriegel and Slocum, 2004, p. 194).

A successful team achieves synergy, which “occurs when people together create new alternatives and solutions that are better than their individual efforts. The greatest chance for achieving synergy is when people don’t see things the same way” (Hellriegel and Slocum, 2004, p. 281), as the whole is greater than the sum of its part. Most textbooks define five types of teams: functional, problem-solving, cross-functional, self-managed, and virtual.

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