The term team building generally refers to the selection, development, and collective motivation of result-oriented teams. Team building is pursued via a variety of practices, such as group self-assessment and group-dynamic games, and generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development.

When a team in an organizational development context embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it can be argued that it is engaging in team building, although this may be considered a narrow definition.

The process of team building includes,

• clarifying the goal, and building ownership across the team and
• identifying the inhibitors to teamwork and removing or overcoming them, or if they cannot be removed, mitigating their negative effect on the team.

To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:

• its current strengths as a team
• its current weakness

To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:

• identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
• design a gap-closure strategy

See also

• Group development
• Collaboration
• Cross-functional team
• List of human resource management topics
• Organizational psychology
• Leadership development
• Teamwork
• Personal development
• Office politics