Groups and teams are not the same thing. In Chapter 9, we defined a group as two or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who work together to achieve particular objectives. A work group is a group that interacts primarily to share information and make decisions to help each member perform within his or her area of responsibility.

Workgroups have no need or opportunity to engage in collective work with joint effort, so the group’s performance is merely the summation of each member’s individual contribution. There is no positive synergy that would create an overall level of performance greater than the sum of the inputs. A workgroup is a collection of individuals doing their work, albeit with interaction and/or dependency.

A work team, on the other hand, generates positive synergy through coordination. The individual efforts result in a level of performance greater than the sum of the individual inputs.

In both workgroups and work teams, there are often behavioral expectations of members, collective normalization efforts, active group dynamics, and some level of decision making (even if just informally about the scope of membership). Both may generate ideas, pool resources, or coordinate logistics such as work schedules; for the workgroup, however, this effort will be limited to information gathering for decision makers outside the group.

Whereas we can think of a work team as a subset of a workgroup, the team is constructed to be purposeful (symbiotic) in its member interaction. The distinction between a workgroup and a work team should be kept even when the terms are mentioned interchangeably in differing contexts. Exhibit 10-1 highlights the differences between them.

The definitions help clarify why organizations structure work processes by teams. Management is looking for positive synergy that will create increased performance. The extensive use of teams creates the potential for an organization to generate greater outputs with no increase in employee headcount. Notice, however, that we said potential. There is nothing magical that ensures the achievement of positive synergy in the creation of teams. Merely calling a group a team doesn’t automatically improve its performance. As we show later, effective teams have certain common characteristics. If management hopes to gain increases in organizational performance through the use of teams, the teams must possess these characteristics.