About This Book

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Team Building
Past, Present, and Future*
W. Gibb Dyer, Jr.
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Teams and their relationship to organizational effectiveness have been a hot
topic in the management literature and popular press in recent years. Selfmanaged
teams, virtual teams, cross-functional teams, and other types of
teams have been popularized and studied as to their role and impact on organizations.
Moreover, the field of organization development (OD) has historically
focused on helping such teams improve their effectiveness. In many ways, the
field of OD developed out of an interest that OD scholars and practitioners have
had in teams and team dynamics, which can trace its roots to the early experiments
with “training-groups” or “T-groups,” which were largely sponsored by
National Training Laboratories (NTL).
My father, William G. Dyer, was part of what might be called the “group
dynamics-humanistic psychology” movement in the 1960s that focused on the
use of T-groups to enhance individual and organizational effectiveness. The
basic T-group was composed of eight to twelve strangers who met with a professional
trainer over a week or two to gain insight regarding their own behavior
and the behavior of others. In those early days, many T-group professionals,
like my father, believed that the T-group was the vehicle for improving the lives
of individuals and organizations. However, in the late 1960s, Campbell and Dunnette
(1968) reviewed the various studies that had documented the impact of
*This chapter is dedicated to my father, William G. Dyer, who taught me the importance of building
effective teams—especially the family.
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