3.3 Types of Teams

Companies build teams to achieve organizational objectives and to improve overall workflow efficiencies by leveraging talent across individual team members. There are several different types of teams you may encounter in the workplace:

1. Manager-led teams: in the manager-led team the manager is the team leader and oversees setting team goals, assigning tasks, and monitoring the team’s performance. The individual team members have relatively little autonomy.
2. Self-managing teams (a.k.a. self-directed or self-regulating teams): have considerable autonomy. They are usually small and often absorb activities that were once performed by traditional supervisors. A manager or team leader may determine overall goals, but the members of the self-managing team control the activities needed to achieve the goals, such as planning and scheduling work, sharing tasks, meeting quality standards, and handling day-to-day operations.
3. Cross-functional teams: cross-functional teams cut across an organization’s functional areas (operations, marketing, finance, etc.). Cross-functional teams are designed to take advantage of the special expertise of members drawn from different functional areas of the company and work together to achieve goals and objectives.
4. Virtual teams: Virtual teams function across organizational boundaries like functional areas, departments, and divisions as well as across time and space. Working in virtual teams allows geographically dispersed members to interact electronically to pursue a common goal. Such technologies as videoconferencing, instant messaging, and electronic meetings, allow people to interact simultaneously and in real time, and offer several advantages in conducting the business of a virtual team. Among other things, members can participate from any location or at any time of day, and teams can “meet” for as long as it takes to achieve a goal or solve a problem—a few days, a few weeks, or a few months.

The roles members perform are vital to the success of a group or a team. Next, we review some of the roles necessary for successful teamwork.

This section is adapted from “The Team and the Organization” in Professional and Technical Writing (2025) by Suzie Baker and is under license Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International