Team Work

Nowadays, team work had become the basic organisation building block (Peters, 1987). It also provides flexibility to respond quickly, effectively than competitors for the organisation environment that demand constant changes (Borrill and West, 2005). Borrill and West (2005) said that organization that using team believe that it can reduced the production costs, speeding up the innovation, increase performance, increase employees satisfaction and participation and most importantly is increasing productivity. For example, W.L. Gore, General Foods and Volvo has introduced team work into their production processes twenty-five years ago, they received a lot of news because no one else was doing it. These days, organization that doesn't use team work has become newsworthy. Recently, 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies have more than half of their employee to work in team.

Team can be defined as a small number of interdependent people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach and shares a common norms of behaviour for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993, cited in Knights & Willmott, 2007: 120). According to Robbins, (2010), team can be divided into several types: problem solving teams, self-managed work teams, cross-functional teams and virtual team. Every single type of teams has their own purpose and characteristics.

There is a different between teams and groups (Robbins, 2010). Group is a number of people in face to face interaction, each aware of their membership and interdependence, as they strive to achieve their goals with no joint effort required (Buchanan & Huczynski, 2010: p. 300). There will be neutral or negative synergy being generated. While the performances of individual within the team result in greater effort than the sum of individual contribution, yet through coordination effort generates positive synergy. Each team members has their own tasks and responsibilities, the task is well planned and there will be no replication of task exists. For example, the business context for team is required by different skill sets of people who work together much of the time for complex challenges. Whilst group, the essences of time is the challenge and the leader already knows what is the best way to proceed (Katzenbach & Santamaria, 1999, cited in Buchanan & Huczynski, 2010: p. 300).