The IT industry is one among the growing industries, which uses teams for project implementations. The existence of high performance teams in Indian IT firms such as TCS, Wipro, Infosys and in global IT organizations such as IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems are discussed in this article. The characteristics of high performance teams such as group decision making, mutual trust, mutual respect, openness, organizational culture, and competencies of team members are also explained.

The Indian IT industry has crossed the $60-bn mark in 2009. It has seen the double-digit growth rate even during tough economic situations. More than two million workers are directly employed by this industry and another eight million people are indirectly dependent on it. Hence, a total of 10 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on this industry in India. Thus, there is a need for us to think about, how are we working and delivering solutions to the customers in this industry. How are we organizing and executing inside the organization to provide solutions and timely response to customers' queries and problems.

Traditionally, organizations have given much importance to individual contributions. Because of the growing nature of complexity and inherent benefits of achieving parallelism and reduced response time to customer problems, work teams came into being in an organization for executing the projects. The research on teams started with Fredric Taylor's scientific experiments on workers in manufacturing and assembly line plants. Slowly, the importance of team orientation was felt in the knowledge-based industries such as IT, biotechnology, pharmaceutical and management consulting industries. Today, more than 80% of the Fortune 500 companies are executing their projects and achieving their organizational objectives using work teams in their organizations.

HRM Review Magazine, Organizational culture, Information Technology, IT, Team Orientation, Organizational Objectives, Organizational Goal, Decision Making, Organizational Climate, Web Conferences, Tata Consultancy Services, TCS, Mutual Trust.