Types of Teams

Hollenbeck, Beersma, & Schouten (2012)

Hollenbeck et al. (2012) argues that the organizational sciences have produced a confusing and ever-expanding list of team type taxonomies, with over 40 distinct team types identified in the literature and no consensus on how to classify teams. The authors contend that the core problem is not a lack of dimensions, but the insistence on converting continuous underlying dimensions into categorical labels — a practice that loses information, creates measurement problems, and makes it difficult to compare findings across studies.

Their proposed solution is a dimensional scaling framework built on three continuous, underlying constructs that appear repeatedly across existing taxonomies:

1. Skill differentiation — the degree to which team members have specialized, non-substitutable knowledge or capabilities.
2. Authority differentiation — the degree to which decision-making power is concentrated in one individual versus distributed across the team.
3. Temporal stability — the degree to which team membership is stable over time, with a shared history and an anticipated future together. (p. 84)

Rather than assigning teams to fixed categories, researchers and practitioners would describe any team by its position along each of these three continua, much like locating a point using three-dimensional coordinates.

A Dimensional Scaling Framework for Describing Teams (Figure 1)

Hollenbeck et al. (2012) presented Figure 1, “A Dimensional Scaling Framework for Describing Teams,” which plots team types along three continuous axes: authority differentiation (vertical; high at top, low at bottom), skill differentiation (horizontal; high at left, low at right), and temporal stability (diagonal; high at right, low at left; see p. 93).

High Authority Differentiation

• Judge-adviser systems — One person (the judge) makes all final decisions; advisers provide specialized input but do not share in the outcome.
• Hierarchical decision-making teams — A formal leader integrates differentiated expertise from members but retains ultimate decision authority.
• Traditional work teams — Stable work units directed by supervisors who make most of the decisions.

Middle Range (Moderate Authority, Varying Skill and Stability)

• Stable emergent leader teams — Leadership emerges informally over time and remains relatively consistent.
• Long-term project teams — Time-limited but sustained collaborations with moderate temporal stability.
• Extreme action teams — Highly skilled specialists who cooperate on urgent, unpredictable tasks and must continuously integrate new members.
• Crews — High role standardization with unstable membership; standardization compensates for personnel turnover.
• Ongoing/intact teams — Teams with relatively stable membership working on continuing tasks.
• Real teams — Hackman’s “real teams,” with stable membership working together over extended periods (high temporal stability).

Low Authority Differentiation

• Democratic teams (voting) — Decisions made by vote; no single authority figure.
• Autonomous/self-managing teams — The team collectively holds decision-making authority; members take responsibility for work allocation and methods.

High Skill Differentiation

• X-teams — Externally oriented, adaptive teams with highly unique member skill sets and flexible, expandable membership.
• Cross-functional teams — Members from different functional backgrounds, each contributing non-substitutable expertise.

Low Skill Differentiation / High Substitutability

• Fully cross-trained teams — Members trained in each other’s roles, making them highly interchangeable.
• Behavioral teams — Routine, programmable tasks requiring little interaction; members are easily substitutable.
• Rotated leadership teams — Leadership moves among members, implying similar skill levels across the team.

Low Temporal Stability

• One-shot lab teams — Strangers assembled once for a brief task, typically in an experimental setting.
• Short-term advice groups — Temporary groups that meet only a few times.
• Student project teams — Work together over a course (weeks), then disband.