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How do teams work?

• An effective team achieves high levels of task performance, member satisfaction, and team viability. Important team inputs include the organizational setting, nature of the task, size, and membership characteristics.

• A team matures through various stages of development, including forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.

• Norms are the standards or rules of conduct that infl uence the behavior of team members; cohesion is the attractiveness of the team to its members.

• In highly cohesive teams, members tend to conform to norms; the best situation is a team with positive performance norms and high cohesiveness.

• Distributed leadership occurs as members share in meeting a team’s task and maintenance needs.

• Effective teams make use of alternative communication structures, such as the centralized and decentralized networks, to best complete tasks. For Discussion What can be done if a team gets trapped in the storming stage of group development?