Understanding team effectiveness
Enhancing team performance starts with understanding what effectiveness looks like. Strong teams share a common purpose, build trust, and align their energy around achieving meaningful results. But just as important as knowing what drives effectiveness is recognising what holds a team back. Below are two models that explore both team effectiveness and the barriers that can get in the way.
What makes an effective team
Effective teams are clear on their purpose, build trust, and create structures that enable collaboration. They balance diverse skills with a commitment to shared goals.
J. Richard Hackman’s Five Conditions for Team Effectiveness outline the characteristics of an effective team and are a useful way to check how well your team is set up to succeed.
The five conditions are:
- A real team (clear boundaries and stability)
- A compelling direction
- An enabling structure
- A supportive organisational context
- Access to coaching
These conditions remind leaders that team design is just as important as individual capability. If the conditions are weak, even skilled people will struggle to perform. Hackman argued that rather than trying to directly manage team behaviour, leaders should focus on shaping the conditions that enable teams to self-organise and grow. As he put it, 'identify the small number of conditions that increase the likelihood that a team will naturally evolve into an ever more competent performing unit'.
If you’d like to get a clearer picture of your team’s effectiveness, the following activity can help you identify the barriers most affecting your team and where to focus your leadership energy.
Learn more
You can learn more about Hackman’s model below.
The Hackman model of team effectiveness explained | EmPerform
Reflect
- Which of Hackman’s conditions are strongest in your team?
- Where might gaps be holding your team back?
- How could you involve your team in strengthening one of these conditions?
Barriers to team effectiveness
All teams encounter challenges, such as unclear roles, low trust, poor communication, or competing priorities.
In their book ‘The Wisdom of Teams’, Katzenbach and Smith interviewed both successful and struggling teams to understand what drives team effectiveness. They identified that barriers arise when there is no common purpose, performance goals, complementary skills, or mutual accountability.
Their work highlights that performance problems are usually about missing ‘collective commitments’, rather than individual shortcomings. They emphasise that real teams are built through disciplined effort around shared purpose and goals, not just by grouping talented individuals together.
This perspective invites a shift in mindset - from diagnosing individual faults to exploring what elements might be missing. By focusing on what your team needs to thrive, you can better support collaboration, accountability, and sustained performance.
Learn more
You can learn more about Katzenbach and Smith’s research below.
Reflect
- What element is missing from your team?
- How clear is your team’s shared purpose?
- Do you see mutual accountability in action, or is performance mostly individualised?
- Which of these four areas (purpose, goals, skills, accountability) would make the biggest difference if improved?
How teams sustain performance
Team effectiveness is not static. It develops overtime and depends on how teams respond to changing demands.
Tannenbaum and Salas’ Team Effectiveness Model illustrates how teams are dynamic, and outcomes are shaped by the interaction of:
- Inputs – the conditions and resources available before team activity begins (team composition, organisational context, task characteristics).
- Processes – the interactions and mechanisms through which team members collaborate (communication, coordination, conflict resolution).
- Outputs - the results of team activity, including performance outcomes, member satisfaction, team viability, and individual and collective learning.
This model highlights that effectiveness is a cycle — strong inputs and processes generate positive outputs, which in turn reinforce team learning and growth.
You can use this model for ongoing monitoring and as a reminder to not only track results, but also pay attention to the conditions and processes that shape them.
Learn more
You can learn more about Tannenbaum and Salas’ model in their book, ‘Teams that Work’.
Reflect
- What processes are working well in your team and which need attention?
- How can outputs (like results and feedback) help guide your next steps?
- How do you currently gather feedback to assess your team’s outputs?
Pause and reflect on understanding team effectiveness
Building an effective team doesn’t happen by chance. It requires clarity, trust, and intentional effort. Using models alongside your own insights can help you identify where your team is strong and where to focus improvement.