This factsheet was last updated in March 2012.
What is teamworking?
Teamworking may be defined as a work practice based on the use of teams, or groups of limited numbers of people, who have shared objectives at work and who co-operate, on a permanent or temporary basis, to achieve those objectives in a way that allows each individual to make a distinctive contribution.
In recent decades, teamworking has grown in importance. Previously, roles at work were often well-defined; in the traditional office or factory, for example, there was usually a strict division of responsibilities and most job titles conveyed exactly which duties people would be expected to undertake. But with advances in technology and education, employers began to place a growing emphasis on versatility, leading to an increasing interest in teamworking at all levels. The gradual replacement of traditional hierarchical forms with flatter organisational structures, in which employees are expected to fill a variety of roles, has similarly played a part in the rise of the team.
More recently, too, a focus on ‘high-performance’ or ‘high-commitment’ work practices has played a part in fostering the use of teamworking. The 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) found teamworking to be the most commonly used work practice among a group of identified ‘high-performance’ practices, with almost three-quarters of workplaces deploying at least some core employees in formally-designated teams.