5 Different types of team
Another aspect of team structure that can be very useful for an employer to understand is the type of team that might be required in a given situation.
As an employee, understanding your team type might help you to perform more effectively or feel motivated to achieve team goals. It could also enable you to better articulate your teamwork experience to future employers. For example, understanding the different types of team you have been a member of might help you to demonstrate a breadth of team working experience.
A quick internet search for ‘types of team’ will reveal many different descriptions. In fact, Hollenbeck et al. (2012) reviewed the literature on team taxonomies and found over forty definitions of different team types (pp. 84–87).
One example of a team taxonomy discussed in their paper, is the work of Cohen and Bailey (1997) who describe four types of team.
- Project teams – come together for a short time to get a specific project completed. This type of team has a finite life and may be cross-functional as people in one workplace may move from project to project or be involved in more than one project team at any one time.
- Work teams – for example in the service sector. This kind of team is in reality more like the working group that was mentioned in Section 3.2.
- Parallel teams – brought together for a specific task such as quality control, they operate outside the usual organisation or management structure. For instance, an organisation like a university may hire a parallel team to create better advertising and marketing campaigns, allowing them to focus on educating students.
- Management teams – made up of top-level executives in the company. They are responsible for overall performance.
Now read the following case study before completing Activity 6.
Case study 1: John
John works full-time in a small independent bookshop ‘The Word on the Street’ in Wigan. There are eight people who work in the shop, most of them full-time but two members of the team work part-time as a job-share.
John is responsible for the children’s section of the bookshop along with Sue. He has a particular interest in books for boys and reluctant readers since he has two sons, one with autism and the other with slight dyslexia. Sue has a degree in creative writing and has published her own book of children’s poetry. Most of their week is spent organising the children’s section, ordering in books and dealing with customer queries which can be in person, by phone or increasingly by email.
On Thursday mornings, John meets with two other colleagues, Josh and Viv, who work in different sections of the shop. Together they have responsibility for the social media profile of the shop which includes updating the website, running an online book club and managing the Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) accounts. Viv has a degree in IT and Josh used to work as a web designer. As this part of the business is growing, it is starting to take up much more of their time and they are considering increasing the time spent on this part of the work to two mornings a week.
While most of his week is spent in the shop, John really enjoys his Friday afternoons when he gets a chance to go to a meeting which is held in the town hall. This is a meeting of the ‘Books for You’ group and is made up of five people including John. The other members are Rajesh from a larger bookshop in town, Amanda from the library service, Devlin who works for an organisation called Arch involved in supporting children’s reading in schools, and Pat who volunteers at the local children’s centre. They have been working together for three weeks now and are planning an event for the October half-term which will take place in venues across the town and promote reading activities for children focused around the theme of a spooky Halloween.
In the next activity, you’ll decide what team types you think John is a member of.
Activity 6 Identify the team
John is involved in at least four different teams as part of his work. Can you identify each team, the team members and, using the Cohen and Bailey taxonomy described above, the type of team in each case? Type your answers into the table below.
| Team | Number of people involved | Skills/interests of team members (if known) | Function/aim | Type of team |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Comment
You may have come up with something like the following.
| Team | Number of people involved | Skills/interests of team members (if known) | Function/aim | Type of team |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bookshop team | Eight people including 2 who job-share | John – children’s books Sue – author of children’s book. Viv and Josh – see below Others not known |
To sell books | Work team |
| Children’s section team | Two people – John and Sue | John – reluctant readers and books for boys Sue – children’s literature (author) |
Organise the children’s section | Work team |
| Social media team | Three people – Josh, Viv and John | Viv – degree in IT Josh – experience as web designer |
Social media and online profile of the shop | Parallel team |
| ‘Books for You’ team | Five people – John, Amanda, Rajesh, Devlin and Pat | Children’s book sales; library services; reading support for children; children’s centre | Events in Wigan to promote children’s involvement with books and the written word | Project team |
In the example of John's case study, you can see that he works in a number of teams at the same time. His involvement in some of those teams may be temporary. Some of the teams are made up of co-workers within his organisation (the bookshop), while the project team is made up of people from different organisations in Wigan with a shared interest in encouraging children to read. At this time it is expected that this group will disband after the event in October, but may continue if they decide to organise another event. If this happens, the make-up of the group could change.
While Cohen and Bailey (1997) provide just one example of a set of team types, Hollenbeck et al. (2012), in response to what they describe as a ‘dizzying array’ of taxonomies, focus on the dimensions that underpin many of the team types defined by different researchers, identifying three key elements:
- Skill differentiation – the degree to which members have specialised knowledge or functional capacities that make it more or less difficult to substitute members (e.g. Josh with his web design experience – important for working on the bookshop website).
- Authority differentiation – the degree to which decision-making responsibility is vested in individual team members, sub-groups of the team, or the collective as a whole.
- Temporal stability – the degree to which team members have a history of working together in the past and an expectation of working together in the future.
Understanding how these dimensions apply to your own team experiences might be helpful when explaining your role within the team to future employers. For example, reflecting on whether you brought specialised knowledge to the team or to what degree you were responsible for decision-making. You’ll look at team roles in more detail in Week 4.
In the next section, you will look at how your experience of working in a team might be enhanced.