In The Wisdom of Teams, the authors define teams as a group of individuals who share common goals and whose performance far outreaches mere working groups. They give five functional definitions of what comprise different groups who work together:

(1) Working group: a group of individual contributors who come together to share information, make decisions, and otherwise collaborate, but contribution is largely individual. "This is a group for which there is no significant incremental performance need or opportunity that would require it to become a team." (p. 91)

(2) Pseudo-team: a group that could become a team, but that lacks the focus or direction to achieve it. "It has no interest in shaping a common purpose or set of performance goals, even though it may call itself a team. Pseudo-teams are the weakest of all groups in teams of performance impact. They almost always contribute less to company performance needs than working groups because their interactions detract from each member's individual performance without delivering any joint benefit." (p. 91)

(3) Potential team: "This is a group for which there is a significant, incremental performance need, and that really is trying to improve its performance impact. Typically, however, it requires more clarity about purpose, goals, work-products and more discipline in hammering out a common working approach. It has not yet established collective accountability." (p. 91)

(4) Real team: "This is a small number of people with complementary skills who are equally committed to a common purpose, goals, and working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. (p. 92)

(5) High-performance team: "This is a group that meets all the conditions of real teams, and has members who are also deeply committed to one another's personal growth and success. That commitment usually transcends the team. The high-performance team significantly outperforms all other like teams, and outperforms all reasonable expectations given its membership." (p. 92)

Interestingly, the authors show on a graph the five types of groups on an X-axis of team effectiveness and a Y-axis of performance impact. The working group is higher in terms of performance than the pseudo-team, and the potential team is about even with the working group in terms of performance, but it excels in team effectiveness. The remaining two categories show considerable movement up and to the right, with a real team outperforming a potential team; naturally, the high-performance team is the most highly productive in terms of both performance and effectiveness.