Does the ‘romance of teams’ exist? The effectiveness of teams in experimental and field settings

Abstract

When we criticize practitioners for their practice, we need to be sure of both their practice and our criticism. If we try to tell a fire-station commander that his use of teams to fight house fires in an inner city housing area is based on romantic misunderstandings, we might just be dismissed as ivory tower academics. The use of teams to accomplish tasks that could not otherwise be accomplished is central to our species’ development. Catching antelopes on the Savannah 200,000 years ago or taking stones from the Preseli mountains in Wales to Stonehenge in southern England and erecting them in the famous circle could not have been accomplished without teamwork; heart bypass operations require tight interdependent working between surgeons, anaesthetists, surgical nurses and administrators; as passengers on airliners, we regularly rely on teamwork to deliver us safely to our destination. There are as many compelling examples as there are tasks that cannot be accomplished without people working interdependently in small groups. We suggest that the critical question researchers should seek to answer for those who work on such tasks is, ‘How can we work most effectively in teams to accomplish the task?’ A separate, but increasingly important question is, ‘How can we manage organizations so that team based working contributes optimally to organizational effectiveness?’ These, we believe, are the urgent questions we should be answering in research.