The Management of teams within organizations is vital in assuring that all required tasks are completed to a satisfactory level. A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who hold themselves mutually accountable for pursuing a common purpose; achieving performance goals and improving interdependent work processes.

Teams within companies are often used for a number of reasons; regularly when there is a clear purpose or job that needs attending to, which requires more than one individual to complete the task at hand. The size of the task, time given to reach a goal or even the overall difficulty of the job, are all examples as to why teams may be assembled to assure all standards are met.

Although it seams that the use of teams is beneficial to the organization, this isn’t always the case. If a team is assigned to smaller tasks, which can be completed by an individual, this takes employees away from their other jobs ultimately resulting in a loss of productivity. Nor should a team be used if there are scarce resources as this has the probable outcome of conflict over who gets to use what, which again leads to low productivity.

Using teams in various ways proves to have many advantages to an organization if these teams jell together with little to no conflict. Increasing customer satisfaction, improvement in product and service quality, increasing speed and efficiency in product development and an increase in job satisfaction to employees are just a handful of likely advantage outcomes through the use of teams. However, the use of teams isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, in fact the list of disadvantages can outweigh the advantages if teams don’t collaborate. There may be an initial high staff turnover and employees may refuse to work in a team or dislike there given groups. The problem of social loafing is also there as some team members