strategy+business – Master the fundamentals of organizational performance before you deploy fancy tools that may magnify dysfunction “….I have never encountered an organization without teams. Some see them as a cure-all. Yet, a recent Harvard Business Review article by organizational psychologist Constance Noonan Hadley and organizational behavior professor Mark Mortensen points out the historically poor performance of teams. The authors note that while teams have long struggled to fulfill their promise as an organizational form, they face especially high hurdles today, in part because organizations keep forming teams without a clear idea of their purpose, how they should be structured and governed, and what expectations members should have for their individual and collective roles and responsibilities. For their part, Hadley and Mortensen propose “co-acting groups,” an alternative team concept in which participants share a goal and work independently but gather occasionally. (Think coders, writers, and designers who contribute to a website redesign without the formality of a rigid team structure and meetings.)..”