7+1 Elements of High-Performance Teamwork

Written by ETB - Empowerment Team Berlin on 2025/12/17.

Is money well spent on team development? To ensure that teams function smoothly, companies invest in team building, team coaching, leadership coaching, etc. Let’s have a critical look at which effects are scientifically proven, so that investments in teams do not go to waste.

What science and practice tell us about teams that truly excel

High-performance teamwork is not an accident. Nor is it the result of charismatic leadership, talent alone, or a single workshop. Decades of research and countless practical experiences show that excellent teamwork emerges when several mutually reinforcing elements are deliberately designed, continuously practiced, and consistently supported.

The following eight elements form a coherent framework for understanding, developing, and sustaining high-performance teamwork. Some can be designed, others live from daily practice, and some emerge only when the fundamental factors are right.

The 7+1 Elements of High-Performance Teamwork

1. Shared Consciousness

A team is more than people working side by side

Shared consciousness is what turns a group of individuals into a team. With it, teams develop a collective sense of "who we are," "why we exist," and "what we are trying to achieve together." Without it, collaboration remains transactional and fragile.

Research on goal-setting and team cognition shows that shared understanding is a powerful driver of performance and persistence. Locke and Latham demonstrated that clear, shared goals significantly increase achievement, while Weick and Roberts’ study of aircraft carrier crews showed how a "collective mind" enables error-free performance under extreme conditions.

Shared consciousness is evident in relation to three tightly linked elements:

Purpose: The overarching reason why the team exists. Purpose provides meaning and orientation, especially in uncertain or stressful situations. Teams with a strong sense of purpose manage to persist even when short-term success fades.
Objectives: Concrete, shared goals to be achieved within a foreseeable timeframe. Objectives translate the team's purpose into a direction in which activities take place. Teams are then able to focus their energies.
Tasks: They are the specific activities required to reach objectives. Clarity at this level prevents confusion and misalignment in everyday work.

Shared Mental Models

Underlying shared consciousness is the concept of shared mental models— knowledge structures that team members hold commonly about the purpose, the team, and the situation. Research by Cannon-Bowers, Salas, and Converse (1993) demonstrated that when team members share mental models, they can anticipate each other’s needs and actions, coordinate implicitly without extensive communication, and adapt to unexpected situations more effectively.

Mohammed, Ferzandi, and Hamilton (2010) conducted a comprehensive review showing that shared mental models foster team performance across a wide variety of contexts, from military teams to healthcare and business settings. There are two types of models that can be distinguished: task mental models (understanding of how the work should be done) and team mental models (understanding of each member’s skills, preferences, and tendencies). High-performing teams develop both types.

Unlike purpose and objectives—which can be articulated and agreed upon—shared mental models develop over time through joint experiences, cross-training (training people to be able to do also other jobs than originally assigned to them), and deliberate discussions about how the team will operate. Leaders can accelerate their development through pre-briefs that establish shared expectations and debriefs that respectfully align interpretations of what occurred.

2. Structure

High performance is largely determined before a team even starts

One of the most robust findings in team research is that structure matters immensely. Hackman (2002) synthesized decades of research to argue that a substantial portion of a team’s effectiveness—perhaps the majority—is determined by its initial design rather than by interventions. His statement that “60% of effectiveness is determined before teamwork even begins” is, however, more of a catchy summary than a precise statistical measurement. Nonetheless, the underlying insight remains powerful: poorly structured teams struggle no matter how motivated or skilled their members are, while well-designed teams have a foundation that supports success. Research confirms that investing in good team design up front pays off.

Wageman, Hackman, and Lehman (2005) later developed the Team Diagnostic Survey, which provides more nuanced assessments of how enabling conditions—including structure—contribute to team effectiveness.

Key structural elements include:

Work and Job Design: Not every task benefits from teamwork. High-performance teams require meaningful interdependences regarding tasks and goals—situations where success genuinely depends on collaboration. Research by Johnson and Johnson (2005) and Wageman (1995) shows that pseudo-teams with low interdependence suffer from social loafing, conflict, and disengagement.
Team Design: Before assembling a team, it must be clear which skills, experiences, and perspectives are needed—and which are not. Overstaffing, understaffing or skill mismatches reduce effectiveness.
Skills: Teams need members who are capable of performing the required tasks. No amount of teamwork can compensate for missing core competencies.
People: Beyond skills, team members must be willing and able to collaborate. Social competence, openness, and reliability matter deeply.
Diversity: The relationship between diversity and team performance is more complex than simple generalizations suggest. Van Knippenberg and Schippers (2007) found that diversity can bring both opportunities (more knowledge, perspectives, creativity) and risks (conflicts, subgroup formation, lower cohesion) for team performance. The decisive mechanism is whether differences are actually translated into an elaborate, task-related exchange of information, or whether they primarily trigger social categorization and “us-versus-them” dynamics. Guillaume et al. (2017) found that diversity generates the greatest benefits when creativity and information processing are at the forefront, while the benefits are smaller for routine tasks. The theoretical work of Page (2007) shows that collective intelligence increases when cognitive diversity is present, i.e., diversity in perspectives and problem-solving approaches. However, this only applies under certain conditions. Basically, diversity can be an advantage that needs to be actively managed.
Clarity of Roles: Teamwork does not mean everyone does everything. Clear roles reduce friction, prevent redundant work, and allow people to contribute their strengths. Role ambiguity, by contrast, is a strong predictor of relationship conflict.
Rules and Norms: Teams benefit from explicitly defined rules about communication, decision-making, and conflict resolution. Team charters, in which teams autonomously define their standards, are particularly valuable in international and intercultural settings.

Rules, roles, and norms in particular should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis. Roles can shift as a result of changing tasks or team members. Rules and norms can become obsolete or need to be updated. Rules in particular tend to take on a life of their own. When this happens, it's time for garbage collection.

Excursus: Power Dynamics and Status

Freedom from power in teams remains an illusion. Structure creates power differentials and hierarchies within teams. Power-associated dynamics significantly influence team functioning. Research shows what we all know: status differences affect who speaks, whose ideas are adopted, and how psychological safety develops within the team.

Power and status are not necessarily negative. Anderson and Brown (2010) documented how status hierarchies can serve useful coordination functions—clarifying who should take the lead in different situations—but can also suppress voice when lower-status members defer excessively to higher-status colleagues. Bunderson and Reagans (2011) identified a "dark side" of expertise-based status: when team members assume that technical expertise automatically confers leadership authority, teams may overlook valuable input from those with different types of knowledge.

Teams with steep hierarchies face different challenges than flat teams. In steep hierarchies, information may not flow freely upward, and members may hesitate to challenge ideas from high-status individuals. In very flat teams, coordination can become difficult when no one is clearly empowered to make decisions. The optimal structure depends on the task and context, but all teams benefit from awareness of how status dynamics operate and explicit efforts to ensure that valuable perspectives are not silenced by informal power structures. Psychological Safety is an important factor that can limit the negative effects of power and status.

An approach often develops independently as “shared leadership.” Pearce and Conger (2003) conceptualized shared leadership as a dynamic, interactive influence process among team members with the objective of leading one another toward goal achievement. Unlike vertical leadership, where influence flows downward from a designated leader, shared leadership involves lateral influence, with different members stepping forward to lead at different times depending on the task and their expertise.

3. Processes and Practices

The team’s way of working: How to work together effectively day by day

Processes and practices translate structures into everyday work. They provide teams with routines and tools that reduce friction and enable coordination in complex environments.

Key elements include:

Communication: Even short training in communication skills significantly improves collaboration. Frameworks such as Nonviolent Communication help teams express needs, address conflict constructively, and build mutual understanding.
Organization: Teams face the challenge to develop a shared way of organizing work: who does what, when, and how. High-performing teams continuously refine these practices.
Coordination: In complex systems, coordination is inevitable—not only within teams, but across teams, suppliers, and customers. Clear interfaces reduce overload and misunderstandings.
Team Learning: Research by West (2000) and Edmondson (1999) shows that teams that regularly reflect on goals, processes, and relationships outperform those that do not—even when skill levels are comparable. Methods such as retrospectives, after-action reviews, and learning loops institutionalize improvement.
Boundary Management: High-performing teams actively manage their boundaries. Ancona and Caldwell (1992) demonstrated that successful teams invest significant effort in stakeholder alignment, information scouting, and external communication. Boundary roles—such as liaison or ambassador—should be explicit and legitimate, not accidental. This is especially important as many teams work in multiteam systems, where coordination across teams is as critical as within-team processes.
Transactive Memory Systems: Originally conceptualized by Wegner (1987) and extensively validated by Lewis (2003), a transactive memory system is the distributed knowledge structure where team members know who knows what. Rather than each member attempting to know everything, the team collectively holds expertise that can be accessed when needed. Lewis found that teams with well-developed transactive memory systems outperform those without, because they avoid redundant effort, can mobilize the right expertise quickly, and make better use of their collective knowledge.

4. Environment

The often underestimated force shaping teamwork

Teams never operate in a vacuum. Their environment profoundly influences motivation, productivity, and well-being.

Important environmental factors include:

Spaces: Physical and virtual workspaces shape how information flows and how people interact. Design elements such as light, sound, layout, and creative zones can either support or hinder collaboration.
Tools: Digital tools for communication and collaboration are essential—especially for hybrid or remote teams. Insufficient tools create friction; adequate tools are effective, but fade into the background. (See dedicated section below on virtual and hybrid teams.)
Leadership: Leadership is one of the most influential environmental factors. Research consistently shows that autonomy-supportive, servant-oriented leadership enables self-organization and performance. Micromanagement and distrust, by contrast, undermine teamwork and often trigger a vicious cycle of increasing control. Google’s Project Aristotle found that managerial behavior based on listening, coaching, and empowering was more important for team effectiveness than individual brilliance.
Support Systems: Teams need institutional support: onboarding workshops, coaching when needed, and accessible HR or organizational partners. High performance is rarely sustained without such scaffolding.
Stakeholders: Teams cannot chose their stakeholders, but relationships with them can be shaped. Teams that develop constructive ways of dealing with pressure from management, customers, or other departments are more resilient.
Culture: While teams create their own micro-cultures, organizational culture sets the boundaries. What is rewarded, tolerated, or punished strongly influences team behavior.
Trust: When a company, namely its managers, grants teams a leap of faith, this also has an effect on the atmosphere within the team itself. Interpersonal trust within the team becomes more likely. See also the section below on trust.

5. Behavior and Mindset

How individuals impact the team every day

Structures, processes and practices only work when enacted through behavior. Individual actions accumulate into team dynamics—for better or worse.

Key behaviors include:

Self-Organization: Individuals who manage their own work reliably reduce coordination costs for others and increase overall productivity.
Communication: Clear, timely, and respectful communication is essential for both task execution and relationship quality.
Feedback: The ability to give and receive feedback constructively allows teams to address problems early and avoid escalation.
Caring: In high-performing teams, members see each other as human beings, not just resources. Research on high-quality connections shows that such care increases resilience and well-being, especially under pressure.
Trust: The more people dare to trust each other, the easier it is for the team to grow together. See also the section below on trust.
Openness, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness: A certain tendency to encounter people open-minded, to be reliable, and to be compatible in dealing with one another helps to find a place and positive relations in a team, whereas social fear and neuroticism can inhibit them. These factors are a part of the personality model "The Big Five" (Soto & John 20.
Growth Mindset: Carol Dweck described a basic belief that enables people to see challenges as opportunities, value effort as a path to mastery, learn from criticism, and find inspiration in others' success, leading to greater resilience and achievement. It is the belief that abilities can be developed through effort and learning.

6. Results

Success and failure as powerful feedback signals

The results of work are not only a consequence of good teamwork. They are also factors that contribute to success in the long term. Results are the perceived impact of the team’s work, directly connected to its Shared Consciousness. They represent the achievements, quality, and tangible outcomes that matter to the team’s purpose and objectives. Experiencing them increases the sense of self-efficacy within the team, also called team-efficacy (Gully et al. 2002). That is important. Teams are not emotionless machines, and a sense of team-efficacy shapes mood, motivation, and identity.

Success should be acknowledged and celebrated appropriately. Recognition reinforces effective behaviors and strengthens cohesion.
Failure should be treated as a learning opportunity, not a source of blame. Sitkin’s research on "intelligent failure" shows that learning-oriented responses accelerate development.

Toyota’s Andon system exemplifies this principle: errors are surfaced immediately, without punishment, to improve the system.

7. Long-term Outcomes

What emerges when the foundations are right, but cannot be created

Outcomes are emergent properties in a systems sense—phenomena that arise from interactions among other elements but cannot be directly produced. While Results can be targeted and measured against objectives, Outcomes emerge from the complex interplay of structure, methods, environment, and behavior over time. They are valuable precisely because they cannot be manufactured on demand.

Typical outcomes include:

Coherence and Belonging: A natural sense of "we" develops when people work productively together.
Cross-Functional Understanding: Research in interdisciplinary healthcare teams showed that well-functioning teams enable members to understand and appreciate other professional perspectives.
Flow: As described by Csikszentmihalyi (1990), flow emerges when goals are clear, challenges match skills, and feedback is immediate. Work becomes energizing rather than draining.
Atmosphere: Teams may never be families, but they can become places where people feel seen and accepted, creating resilience under pressure.
Identity and Pride: Members of effective teams often identify strongly with the team and its purpose. Pride arises.
Trust: The better and longer people cooperate, the more trust can grow between them. See also the section below on trust.
Psychological Safety: Popularized by Amy C. Edmondson (1999, 2018), Psychological Safety cannot be manufactured. It emerges when trust, structure, leadership, and behavior align over time. Attempts to "install" it without addressing the fundamentals are usually ineffective.

Plus 1: Cross-sectional Factor Trust

The invisible glue of teamwork

Experienced trust within a team correlates strongly with the quality of teamwork. So why isn't it a separate factor in the model? This is because, firstly, it is complicated and, secondly, it is multifaceted and integrated in different sections.

Let's look at the complicated side first. People often talk about “building trust.” That doesn't work. Trust cannot be instilled in people or teams. What companies can do is create an environment that promotes trust. We have already discussed this in section 4, Environment. This includes reliable framework conditions, functional experience of the organization, experience of competence among colleagues, clear communication, and also the trust that organizations can give to teams and employees. Yes, experiencing trust makes it easier to trust others. A kind of “system trust” (Luhmann, 1971) develops, which is an important basis for cooperation within the company.

Trust can neither be built nor demanded. It is therefore also one of the long-term effects (section 7) and develops on the basis of experience, especially in situations where trust is critical. It can take months to lay such a foundation, and trust can be destroyed in seconds. Trust grows slowly through consistency, fairness, and transparency, and disappears quickly when it is violated.

However, whether trust develops depends not only on the environment, people, or experiences, but also on each person's personal disposition to show trust. This is more strongly developed in some people than in others. People who find it very difficult to trust others will always encounter to some degree trouble working in teams.

Trust is not always the same; it can take many forms. We have already talked about system trust. Another form, interpersonal trust, plays an important role within the team itself. On the one hand, it requires trust in the competence and reliability of other team members and, on the other hand, trust that others care and act with good intentions, or at least do not want to cause harm – neither to individuals nor to the team. Here we are talking about the kind of trust that is created through daily behavior (section 5).

Meta-analyses by Dirks and Ferrin (2001) show that trust predicts performance, cooperation, and lower monitoring costs. Without trust, self-organization remains more of a buzzword than a reality.

Team Dynamics Over Time

How teams evolve through stages and transitions

The elements described above do not operate in a static environment. Teams evolve over time, and different elements become salient at different stages. Understanding team development helps leaders and members anticipate challenges and deploy interventions appropriately.

Developmental Stages

Tuckman’s (1965) model of forming, storming, norming, and performing—later extended to include adjourning (Tuckman & Jensen, 1977)—remains influential as a framework for understanding how teams develop:

Forming: Team members come together, often with uncertainty about roles and relationships. Structure matters most at this stage—clear purpose, defined roles, and explicit norms help teams move through forming efficiently. Shared mental models and transactive memory systems are just beginning to develop.
Storming: As members become more comfortable, differences surface. This stage is characterized by conflict over working styles, priorities, and influence. Rather than viewing storming as a problem to be avoided, effective teams use this stage to surface and resolve important issues, and develop an individual way of working.
Norming: Teams develop shared expectations and working patterns. Trust begins to solidify, and members develop confidence in each other’s reliability and competence. Processes and practices become routinized.
Performing: Teams operating at this stage have internalized their structure and methods, freeing energy for task execution. Emergent outcomes like flow and psychological safety are most likely to appear. The team functions as a cohesive unit with shared consciousness fully developed.
Adjourning: Teams that complete their purpose enter a dissolution phase. As noted earlier, teams with strong shared consciousness dissolve naturally when their mission is complete, without conflict or disappointment.

Team Measurement and Diagnostics

Assessing team effectiveness systematically

We are currently working on developing a comprehensive, multilingual diagnostic tool and will make it available soon. If you are interested, please sign up for the waiting list below and we will notify you as soon as it is available.

Yes, please inform me when the new team diagnostic tool is available:

If you would like to start working with the framework now, you can use existing diagnostic tools that cover specific aspects:

Team Diagnostic Survey (TDS): Developed by Wageman, Hackman, and Lehman (2005), the TDS assesses the enabling conditions for team effectiveness, including real team structure, compelling direction, enabling structure, supportive context, and expert coaching. It provides a comprehensive view of whether the foundational elements are in place.
Psychological Safety Scale: Edmondson’s (1999) seven-item scale measures the degree to which team members feel safe to take interpersonal risks. Given the importance of psychological safety as both an enabling condition and an emergent outcome, this measure is particularly valuable.
Team Climate Inventory: Developed by Anderson and West (1998), this instrument assesses team climate for innovation, including vision, participative safety, task orientation, and support for innovation.
Transactive Memory System Scale: Lewis’s (2003) scale assesses specialization, credibility, and coordination—the components of effective knowledge distribution within teams.

The impact of structured reflection workshops should not be underestimated. Regular reviews that examine what works well, what does not, and what should be changed provide continuous diagnostic information. Debriefings and reviews after significant events enable teams to learn from both successes and failures.

But be careful! When using diagnostic tools, several principles apply: measure at the team level (not just individual perceptions), compare results to appropriate benchmarks, focus on actionable elements that can be changed, and use measurement as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of an evaluation.

Interventions

How to improve team climate and performance

We will provide further information on how teamwork can be further developed and the conditions for high-performance teams be perfected in future articles.

The 7+1 elements offer a wide range of starting points, but also a number of areas where problems can arise. That is why the first step is a team diagnosis, a team assessment.

Only when it is clear where the problems lie can measures be tailored to the specific needs of a team. Here are a few examples:

With regard to shared consciousness, workshops help to align common understanding, goals and tasks.
Mental models can also be made explicit in workshops and then brought to life through conscious reflection in structured pre- and post-meetings.The structure benefits from active team and task design and intensive support during the launch in the form of team-building events.
During team building or even a team restart, roles, norms, processes, and practices are developed together.
Processes and practices can also be improved through targeted training, for example through communication workshops based on nonviolent communication or coordination exercises such as simulation-based team training.
The environment deserves special attention. Leadership coaching is one of the most effective measures. It helps managers gain confidence and establish behaviors that promote autonomy and empowerment for teams.
Self-organization is most effective when regular retrospectives take place.
Results arise naturally and can be reinforced by rituals such as celebrating successes and “intelligent failures.”

Conclusion

High-performance teams are no mere coincidence. They require thoughtful design, disciplined practice, and patience. When the core elements are aligned—shared consciousness with developed mental models, appropriate structure that accounts for power dynamics, processes and practices including supportive environments for both co-located and virtual work, supported by constructive individual behaviors, deep trust, and experiencing emergent outcomes—teams are capable of extraordinary achievements. They become places where people grow, contribute, and thrive.

The framework presented here is not a checklist to be completed but a lens through which to understand and continuously improve the complex human endeavor of working together.