What Is a Team Structure?
A team structure, in a business setting, involves groups of people who form teams that work toward a common goal of the overall structure. Ideally, each team has members that complement each others abilities; individual teams are less hierarchical. Teams can change over time, but the overall goal is the same for all of the teams.
One organizational chart for team structures in a business includes one top manager that supervises lower managers; each lower manager supervises a team that generally lacks ranks. Each team member has a specific role to fill and a specific task to work toward a common goal with other team members. One team has a specific task to accomplish, while another team that has the same rank works on another task. Both teams are part of a larger goal.
To start, teams must learn to work together quickly, and managers must assign tasks right away. Managers must also work out differences among personalities on the team. Sometimes, teams rotate tasks to prevent boredom or to bring fresh ideas to a project. Team structure can also work in a classroom setting for group assignments.
Teams in team structure theory need to have cohesion in order to work together, a term sometimes known as synergy. The goal of managers in a team structure is to take this synergy to motivate teams to achieve a common goal.
