Teamwork is essential for competing in today's global arena, where individual perfection is not as desirable as a high level of collective performance. In knowledge based enterprises, teams are the norm rather than the exception. A critical feature of these team is that they have a significant degree of empowerment, or decision-making authority. There are many different kinds of teams: top management teams, focused task forces, self-directed teams, concurrent engineering teams, product/service development and/or launch teams, quality improvement teams, and so on. Not all groups in organizations are teams, but all teams are groups. The difference between a team and a group is that a team is interdependent for overall performance. A group qualifies as a team only if its members focus on helping one another to accomplish organizational objectives. In today's quickly changing business environment, teams have emerged as a requirement for business success. Therefore you should constantly try to help groups become teams and facilitate the evolution of groups into teams.
In the new era of systemic innovation, it is more important for an organization to be cross-functionally excellent than functionally excellent. Firms which are successful in realizing the full returns from their technologies and innovations are able to match their technological developments with complementary expertise in other areas of their business, such as manufacturing, distribution, human resources, marketing, and customer relationships. To lead these expertise development efforts, cross-functional teams, either formal or informal, need to be formed. These teams can also find new businesses in white spaces between existing business units.
At General Electric (G ...