Overview

Teams are increasingly used by a wide range of organizations. From the factory floor to the corporate board room, teams are viewed as a means to motivate participants, increase productivity, and flatten the organizational hierarchy. Teams are not new and have been around since the beginning of human history. What is new is the concerted analysis of what makes work teams and the successful application of the resulting principles to build effective teams.

In this module, team success is discussed from two vantage points. The first is what makes teams effective in the commercial and government sectors in normal operational environments. The second is what makes teams effective in safety-critical environments such as aviation. The evolution and contribution of Crew Resource Management (CRM) to incident and accident reduction is covered at length, as well as its efficacy when adopted by other safety critical applications.