and others in the organisation? What disciplines, knowledge, skills and experience need to be available within the team? What type of people do you select and how well should they fit together (personal chemistry)? Easy questions, difficult answers.

From different angles research has been done in how people work together in groups (in terms of personality and roles, e.g. Belbin). The outcomes are not always complementary to one another and neither are these outcomes readily available as an instrument for management. In day-to-day reality managers often have a need for a team and only a limited number of people who might be a member of the proposed team. In such a situation the manager does not have the ‘luxury’ to determine whether individuals fit specific criteria for optimal team co-operation or whether all possible positions (on the basis of this or that theory) have been covered. However, with a theory in hand and with hindsight the manager may better understand what went wrong or could have been done better.

The identity of a small group is different than that of other small groups. It has its own nature and its own history although the differences are sometimes hard to pinpoint. The rules, set at the beginning determine a lot of the actual development of the team. A team develops common norms, common interpretations and applications of norms in the day-to-day working environment. These norms form the basis of a team’s culture, separating one team from the other. A team has to agree on its objectives and to make the best of realising them. This struggle is in itself an important source for the team’s culture (and of course the theories may help in sorting things out). A team’s culture is in most cases different from the organisation’s culture, simply because different groups have different ways of thinking and acting.

The team’s culture does not need to be aligned with the culture of the parent organisation (fit). Some difference is unavoidable because the team members are not representative for the organisation

the most successful groups … had three characteristics, the really successful teams. First of all, they showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. (…)Secondly, the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers. And thirdly, the more successful groups had more women in them. Margaret Heffernan in her Ted-talk