In business, the terms team and workgroup are often used interchangeably. However, they differ in nuanced yet important ways.

To be clear, teams and workgroups both serve a purpose. Not every workgroup, for example, needs to function with team characteristics to be effective. Their purposes depend on why people are working together. And problems can arise when a group of individuals function more like a workgroup, despite their purpose being to function as a team.

For our purposes, a team is a group of people who must work together collaboratively, often with complementary skills, to achieve a common goal, such as sports teams or an orchestra. In these situations, if not everyone is working cohesively toward a common goal, things can fall apart quickly. You can see and hear when sports teams and orchestras are not behaving as a unified team.

Generally speaking, effective teams exhibit these important characteristics:

• They have an agreed focus on collective team goals.

• The reason for convening regularly is to plan, make decisions, and solve problems together.

• They have a sense of mutual accountability.

• Performance is based on collective outputs.

• Understanding team leadership is shared to meet team goals.

Workgroups, on the other hand, tend to have these characterized:

• They agree that each member should focus on their individual products and outputs in the group.

• The purpose of the group is shaped primarily by one person, typically a manager, rather than needing member consensus.

• Members stick to their delineated roles and responsibilities when compared to the shared and more collaborative and inter-dependent roles of teams.

In workgroups, all members agree that your priority is typically to achieve individual versus team goals. Consider, for example, a football team versus a bowling or golf team. The latter may behave more like workgroups because they’re not collaborating in any meaningful sense, other than pooling resources and compiling individual scores. For the football team, however, collaboration must supersede even raw talent to compete against a high-performing team.

If Your Team Is Operating as a Workgroup…

Workgroups are sufficient in situations where collaborating toward a shared goal is a secondary concern and can even offer some advantages, such as the ability to be quickly set up and deployed. Sales teams often fit this description. Most salespeople are rewarded for achieving their individual sales targets, which typically means they don’t need to coordinate their work with their sales co-workers. A frequent challenge occurs, however, when collections of individuals are operating as workgroups, but the situation requires them to work as teams. If this is the case, you may experience things like:

• Members having different objectives and potentially competing agendas when working together

• Time and resources squandered

• Employees feeling disengaged, not included, and lacking motivation

• Absence of coordinated organizational responsiveness

• Delays in resolution of issues and capitalizing on opportunities

If you’re in this situation, the first step is to be open about it. Gain agreement from members that you’re functioning like a workgroup when you must function like a team. Next, pay close attention to several psychological factors that underscore team success.

Develop Trust and a Sense of Psychological Safety

Trust involves the faith or assurance team members hold in each other’s intentions, dependability, and abilities. Meanwhile, psychological safety denotes the collective belief within a team that engaging in interpersonal risks is secure from punishment, embarrassment, or retaliation. You can work to build trust and psychological safety by:

• Honoring the input of every team member

• Advocating impartiality, clarity, and equitable chances

• Fostering candid dialogue and attentively considering varied viewpoints

• Creating opportunities for the team to learn from their successes and failures

Focus on Processes and Their Alignment to Purposes

The teams’ processes and how they’re aligned to the team’s fundamental purpose often dictate success. You can work to improve processes, alignment, and purpose by:

• Clarifying roles and responsibilities within the team

• Acknowledging individual strengths when assigning tasks and activities

• Establishing mutual accountability for agreed-upon actions that bolster team achievements

• Ensuring alignment of the team’s objectives with broader organizational priorities

• Defining clear milestones to monitor advancement

• Allowing team members to hold each other accountable and share leadership

Develop Adaptability

This factor of team psychology describes a team’s ability to adjust what they’re doing to meet the needs of the circumstances. While it often requires innovation, in many instances, it simply requires slight changes to existing products, processes, or ways of working together. To make your team more adaptive, focus on:

• Developing a culture of quickly identifying and responding to challenges as they arise

• Encouraging people to regularly step out of their comfort zones—to attempt new approaches and learn from challenges

• Continuously progressing on how you work together, and making it a regular point of discussion

Conclusion

Effective teams focus on shared goals, convene for planning and decision-making, exhibit mutual accountability, and share leadership roles. In contrast, workgroups emphasize individual outputs, follow manager-defined purposes, and have clearly defined roles. If your team is operating more like a workgroup, you must shift the mindset of members and focus on the fundamentals of teamwork. An effective way of increasing teamwork is to engage independent and experienced team facilitators to help the team explore and work with team psychology.

As you work to hone the psychological factors discussed in this article, one of the most effective tools in your quiver is understanding personality type. For example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) framework can offer insight into people’s preferred styles for work, thought, socializing, and communication that can aid tremendously in optimizing the collaborative culture that teams require to thrive. With the right approach, you can transform your workgroup into a high-performing team.