Benefits and Costs of Teams

The ongoing management of teams requires additional insights. These include understanding the benefits and costs of teams, promoting effective performance in teams, and identifying and developing teamwork competencies.

The best reason to start teams in any organization is to achieve the positive benefits that can result from a team-based environment: enhanced performance, employee benefits, reduced costs, and organizational enhancements. Enhanced performance can come in many forms, including improved productivity, quality, and customer service. Working in teams enables workers to avoid wasted effort, reduce errors, and react better to customers, resulting in more output for each unit of employee input. Such enhancements result from pooling of individual efforts in new ways and from continuously striving to improve for the benefit of the team.

Employees tend to benefit as much as organizations in a team environment. Rather than relying on the traditional, hierarchical, manager-based system, teams give employees the freedom to grow and to gain respect and dignity by managing themselves, making decisions about their work, and really making a difference in the world around them.

The costs of teams are usually expressed in terms of the difficulty of changing to a team-based organization. Managers have expressed frustration and confusion about their new roles as coaches and facilitators, especially if they developed their managerial skills under the traditional hierarchical management philosophy. Some managers have felt as if they were working themselves out of a job as they turned over more and more of their directing duties to a team.

Management must therefore be fully committed before initiating a change to a team-based organization.