The Advantages & Disadvantages of Teams in the Workplace

Teams have become increasingly prominent in the workplace. A team-oriented organizational structure means companies or divisions rely on small work groups or teams to manage various products or tasks. Work teams offer some benefits because of the collaboration of several employees, but challenges also exist when work teams replace more individualized work.

What's Different About Teams

Firms are often organized in a fairly rigid and hierarchical structure. While this is suitable for getting a lot of business done, it also tends to create certain "silos": managers meet with fellow managers, marketing staff meets with other marketing people, and there's not a lot of cross-fertilization between departments or different levels of the management hierarchy.

Teams tend to break through these artificial boundaries. A team-oriented approach to accomplishing a project identifies the most appropriate staff at all levels and in all departments who can best make a contribution to the project, and brings these individuals together as a functional team.

Teams Can Offer Better Solutions

A main reason companies opt for work teams rather than individualized work is to derive better quality, and more thorough and more creative solutions to problems or situations. By having employees with different backgrounds and perspectives discussing the pros and cons of alternative solutions, the best possible solution tends to win out. Moreover, team members can collaborate to enhance the benefits of the best solution by continuing to work together to enact it.

The Team Approach Can Increase Productivity

Along with better quality, well-managed workplace teams often produce more results as well. Members in a team can hold each other accountable and drive each other to more efficient work. By setting individual goals to go along with team goals, the employees within work teams can create some friendly competition and use the peer-pressure influence to keep each other motivated to reach quotas or objectives.

Intra-Team Conflicts Can Arise

Along the path of working toward better solutions, work teams often experience more conflict than individual employees working in the same office. Work teams usually have the intent of encouraging more ideas and creating a team culture where debate is accepted. When employees have more natural disagreement, tension and personal frustration can enter the mix, causing team members to experience interpersonal conflict.

To preserve effective team functioning over time, employees need to quickly resolve conflicts and move past them. Managers on a team may have to refrain from trying to "pull their weight" since they are not the line supervisor of many of the other team members.

So Can Inter-Team Conflict

Along with the conflict within work teams, conflict between work teams is a challenge presented by a teamwork structure. Teams can view themselves as competing for attention and praise for accomplishments rather than cooperating in the bigger-picture goals of the organization. Company leaders need to figure out how to reward teamwork while encouraging cooperation toward organizational goals. Inter-team conflict is especially problematic when teams have to collaborate on important work tasks or projects.