Hackman (1990) has identified some tripwires regarding the design and implementation of teams. If your team is not performing as effectively as you would like, perhaps one or more of the following tripwires is holding it back.

Tripwire 1: Call the performing units a team but really manage members as individuals. Here the danger arises from setting up and telling people they are a team, but then continuing to treat them as individual performers. For example, if the career and reward system assesses only individual performance, there is not much incentive for people to work collaboratively. So calling a set of people a team is not enough; action must be taken to build a team by establishing team boundaries and then giving the team authority to manage their internal processes and their relationships with external entities.