This chapter will look at teams, team development and change from a number of perspectives and will be asking a number of pertinent questions:

• What is a group and when is it a team?

• Why do you need teams?

• What types of organizational teams are there?

• How do you improve team effectiveness?

• What does team change look like?

• What are the leadership issues in team change?

• How do individuals affect team dynamics?

• How well do teams initiate and adapt to organizational change?

The chapter aims to enhance understanding of the nature of teams and how they develop, identify how teams perform in change situations, and develop strategies for managing teams through change and change through teams.

We open with a discussion around what constitutes a group and what constitutes a team. We will also look at the phenomena of different types of teams: for example, virtual teams, self-organizing teams and project teams.

Models of team functioning, change and development will be explored. We look at the various components of team working, and at how teams develop and how different types of people combine to make a really effective (or not) team.

We take as our basic model Tuckman’s model of team development to illustrate how teams change over time. This is the forming, storming, norming and performing model. But we will add to it by differentiating between the task aspects of team development and the people aspects of team development.

Finally we look at the way in which teams can impact or react to organizational change.