Teamwork
Teamwork refers to the collaborative behaviors, attitudes, and cognitions that team members enact as they work together toward shared goals. While team performance captures what a team accomplishes, teamwork captures how team members interact and coordinate in the process of doing so. The distinction is important: two teams may achieve similar performance outcomes but differ substantially in the quality of their teamwork processes.
The scientific study of teamwork has produced a rich taxonomy of behaviors that support effective collaboration. These include communication, coordination, cooperation, backup behavior, mutual performance monitoring, and adaptability, among others. Research has consistently shown that teams whose members engage in these behaviors more effectively tend to perform better, particularly under high-stakes or complex conditions.
Teamwork is not a single construct but a family of interrelated processes that unfold across time. Models of teamwork have distinguished between taskwork (the work itself) and teamwork (the interpersonal and coordinative processes that support it), and between different phases of team activity in which different teamwork behaviors are most salient. This section of the website reviews the major frameworks, behavioral taxonomies, and research findings that define the science of teamwork.