You might conclude from the ubiquitous and somewhat fetishized presence of teams and teamwork narratives in contemporary organisations that teams are a shiny new phenomenon. So, it feels as though teams and teamwork have enjoyed a breakout arrival into the management zeitgeist. I argue that modern teams have been developing along four separate dimensions, all progressing more or less independently. Ultimately, they have merged to create a sense of overnight success. But, as they say, overnight success takes years to achieve.

In reality, modern teamwork has been gathering momentum for about a century. As Devine et al. (1999:679), put it: “it would be fallacious to assume that greater visibility coincides with a general increase in the use of teams.” Four strands within the development of teamwork can be considered together. The four strands are:

  • Macro-level history
  • The Human Relations School
  • The emergent discourse of teamwork
  • The team as a unit of organisational control

Macro-level history

Teamwork has not followed a steady growth trend over the past century. Instead, societal and political changes influence our interest in and adoption of teamwork as a societal concept. Weiss and Högl (2015) found that teamwork’s prominence has peaked and dipped at various historical points. For instance, attention to teamwork surged during the two world wars. This trend suggests teamwork gains prominence when external circumstances highlight the need to address challenges through coordinated interdependence.

Weiss and Högl (2015) also observed a broad displacement of professions and activities during wartime. Consequently, teamwork and cooperation became essential substitutes for the shortage of expertise. A similar pattern may emerge when we reflect on the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Hopefully, the same will be valid for our response to climate change. After the World Wars, teamwork’s diffusion plateaued and even declined through the mid-20th century. However, from the early 1990s onward, teamwork saw a resurgence, likely due to the rapid growth of digital technology (Adler, 2003), which introduced complex working methods that inherently require collaboration.

The Human Relations School

Mary Parker Follett was arguably one of the earliest proponents of the value of the relational and interdependent dynamics of teams. Follett’s (1924: 3) work, Creative Experience, speaks of coactive power leading to “the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.” Correspondingly, this is seen as a precursor to the Human Relations School (or HRS), often characterised as the academic counterpoint to the Scientific Management school. Where Scientific Management (or Taylorism) otherwise sought to categorise, index, and break down labour into measurable and optimisable units of productivity, the Human Relations School humanised labour, focusing on the people, not the productivity.

That is to say that the concept of labour within the HRS accommodated the irrationality of humans and the need for belonging and fulfilment beyond simply accounting for measured instrumental outputs (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939). Although the history of the HRS is complex in its own right and is widely critiqued, improved levels of organisational commitment and industrial relations were considered to result from this approach and laid the foundations for teamwork as an organisational idea by seeing human interaction and the social dynamics therein as part of the substance of working life.

The Emergent Discourse of Teamwork

The discourse on teamwork represents an evolution that begins with Human Relations era research talking about workgroups, moving on to the framing of groups that are formed around the interdependent pursuit of commonly agreed goals as teams; then onto categorical distinctions of team types, such as High Performance Teams (HPTs, [Parker et al., 1994]), Virtuoso Teams (Boynton & Fischer, 2009), and X-teams (Ancona et al., 2002).

There are also distinctions, such as those made by Finn (2008), between teamwork (representing the linguistic dynamics of teams) and teamwork (representing the material practice that teams engage in). So, as teamwork has been utilised, tested, researched and understood, it has become a distinctive concept and an accepted feature of the theoretical and material substance of organisational life. This has embedded it within assumptions and expectations for contemporary work, making it feel more significant and influential – for example, the idea of wanting to pursue a goal or take on a project alone would arguably feel anathema to modern organisational discourse.

The Team as a Unit of Organisational Control

The final strand presents a more critical view of the breakout of teamwork. But it also ties the other three strands together. The themes of belonging and commitment that emerged from the Human Relations School set two dynamic elements into play. One was to wed participation in work to social identity (defined as one’s sense of belonging to a group). Secondly, people’s relationships with work were increasingly built with their co-workers. This shrunk the importance of the direct relationship between individual employees and the organisation.

So, as organisations grew in size and complexity, cultivating workers’ sense of identity directly within their team was more straightforward than grasping for a generalised sense of corporate identity. Such group-level identity then fosters commitment, efficiency and all the other values that we associate with people management. Further, conflict and other issues can be framed as dysfunctions of the team and its members rather than missteps by the organisation. So, as Townley (1993) and Procter and Mueller (2000) note, a subtle yet efficient means of controlling and directing workers is achieved by making one’s work intermeshed with the emotional and cognitive relationships within their team. Thus, an essential strand in our understanding of the emergence of teamwork is its value to management agendas. Teams create the ability to assert control whilst retaining a sense of agency among team members (Bruce & Nyland, 2011).

Panacea or State of Convenience?

Considering the strands of its heritage together, it becomes evident that teamwork is not necessarily an objective panacea for 21st-century organisational effectiveness. To sum up, this has all been brewing over time until the external context, workers’ preferences and the management’s agendas have been united in their demand for complex interactions and interdependence. Perhaps the history of teamwork shows it more as a fragile means of maintaining stability among these powerful forces, lacquered with a fashionable discourse that embellishes it as an innately transformative phenomenon that we can’t live without. Either way, despite its newfound prominence, teamwork remains an undervalued, under-resourced, and underappreciated force in modern organisations.

References

Adler, P. S. (2003). Towards collaborative interdependence: A century of change in the organization of work. In B. Kaufman, R. Beaumont, & R. Helfgott (Eds.), Balancing the interests: The evolution from industrial relations to human resources and beyond (pp. 353-399). Armonk, NY: Sharp.

Ancona, D., Bresman, H., & Kaeufer, K. (2002). The comparative advantage of X-teams. MIT Sloan Management Review, 43(3), 33-40.

Boynton, A., & Fischer, B. (2009). Virtuoso teams: the extraordinary stories of extraordinary teams. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Bruce, K. & Nyland, C. (2011). Elton Mayo and the deification of human relations. Organization Studies, 32(3), 383-405.

Devine, D. J., Clayton, L. D., Philips, J. L., Dunford, B. B., & Melner, S. B. (1999). Teams in organizations: Prevalence, characteristics, and effectiveness. Small Group Research, 30(6), 678-711.

Follett, M. P. (1924). Creative Experience. London: Longmans, Green and company.

Parker, S.K., Mullarkey, S. and Jackson, P.R. (1994). “Dimensions of performance effectiveness in high-involvement work organisations”, Human Resource Management Journal, Vol. 4 No. 3,pp. 1-21.

Procter, S. & Mueller, F. (Eds). (2000). Teamworking. London: Macmillan.

Roethlisberger, F. J., & Dickson, W. J. (1939). Management and the Worker, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Townley, B. (1993). Foucault, power/knowledge, and its relevance for human resource management. Academy of Management Review, 183:518–545.

Weiss, M., & Högl, M. (2015). The History of Teamwork’s Societal Diffusion. Small Group Research, 46(6), 589-622.

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