The term team-building can refer generally to the selection and motivation of teams, or more specifically to group self-assessment in the theory and practice of Organizational development (OD).

Generic team-building

"Team building" (or "teambuilding") can refer to the process of establishing specific groups to accomplish certain tasks in a sports club or some sort of organization. Ingredients seen as important to the successful set-up and launch of such team efforts include:

• selection
• establishing visions, goals, missions and/or objectives
• distribution of workload
• timetabling
• balancing skill-sets
• metrics
• harmonising personality types
• training on how to work together

The morale of the team, an important variable, may depend on such factors as:

• support
• resources
• communication
• personalities

As team performance reflects on management, managers -- and even coaches -- sometimes feel the need to take part in constructing and fostering teams.

As with many activities, team-building can run to extremes. For a notorious recent example of team building run amok, see the case of Kamp Staaldraad in 2003.

Team-building in Organizational development

Whenever a team in an OD context embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it engages in team building.

Assessing team effectiveness

To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:

• its current strengths as a team
• its current weaknesses

Improving team performance

To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:

• identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
• design any gap-closure strategy

See also

• cross-functional team
• Forming-storming-norming-performing
• list of human resource management topics
• Team

External links

• So You Wanna Be a Playa: Cooperative Games for Social Change - A free booklet of activities for teambuilding, problemsolving, and more.
• The Nasa Exercise: Lost on the Moon - On-line version of a widely used team-building exercise for measuring team processes.
• Developing Teamwork - A DVD-video based team building package designed for organisations wishing to improve the effective use of the intellectual resource of their people. Available for review online free of charge.

Off-line reference material

• William G. Dyer, Team building: Current Issues and New Alternatives (3rd Edition). Pearson Education POD, 1995. ISBN 0201628821.