Team or group? Managers’ perceptions of the differences

Abstract

States that organizations are using teams and groups to an increasing extent yet current researchers often use the terms interchangeably, despite literature indicating both that their processes and outputs may be very different, and that these differences may have important consequences. Examines how, in order to differentiate between management teams and groups based on the descriptions of managers’ experience in the workplace, 319 part‐time MBA students completed a checklist comprising 149 adjectives. Analyses showed that both teams and groups were best described by separate one factor solutions. Discusses how teams and groups were described equally as “affective”, “effective”, “energetic” and “flexible”; teams were described as “creative”, “innovative”, and “well rounded”, groups were described as “negotiating”, “networking”, “persuasive”, and “the sum of individual goals”. Posits that such characterizations were taken as suggesting that teams create resources and add to their environments while groups manage and redistribute their resources, and further, that teams have stable, valued interpersonal relations but groups do not.

Citation

Fisher, S.G., Hunter, T.A. and W.D., K. (1997), "Team or group? Managers’ perceptions of the differences", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 12 No. 4, pp. 232-242. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683949710174838