A number of writers have studied teams, looking for the characteristics that make some successful. Larson and LaFasto looked at high performance groups as diverse as a championship football team and a heart transplant team and found eight characteristics that are always present. They are listed below:

1. A clear, elevating goal

2. A results driven structure

3. Competent team members

4. Unified commitment

5. A collaborative climate

6. Standards of excellence

7. External support and recognition

8. Principled leadership

Lippitt maintains that groups operate on four levels: organizational expectations, group tasks, group maintenance, and individual needs. Maintenance level activities include encouraging by showing regard for others, expressing and exploring group feelings, compromising and admitting error, gatekeeping to facilitate the participation of others, and setting standards for evaluating group functioning and production.

Lippitt defines teamwork as the way a group is able to solve its problems. Teamwork is demonstrated in groups by: (a)"...the group's ability to examine its process to constantly improve itself as a team," and (b) "the requirement for trust and openness in communication and relationships." The former is characterized by group interaction, interpersonal relations, group goals, and communication. The latter is characterized by a high tolerance for differing opinions and personalities.

The Fifth Discipline, Senge's original work on "the learning organization," published in 1990. Named in 1997 by the Harvard Business Review as one of the most influential business books of the last two decades, the Fifth Discipline articulates a breakthrough approach to thinking about organizational learning and change, built on five critical disciplines: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, published in 1994, is something of "tool kit" for individuals working with or within organizations to implement these disciplines, and includes exercises, stories, and resources.

Peter M. Senge is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Chairperson of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants dedicated to the "interdependent development of people and their institutions." He is the author of the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990).

The discipline of team learning starts with "dialogue," the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine "thinking together." (Dialogue differs from the more common "discussion," which has its roots with "percussion" and "concussion," literally a heaving of ideas back and forth in a winner-takes-all competition.) Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. "Unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn."

A recent concept in OD is that of the learning organization. Peter Senge considers the team to be a key learning unit in the organization. According to Senge, the definition of team learning is:

...the process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire. It builds on the discipline of developing shared vision. It also builds on personal mastery, for talented teams are made up of talented individuals.

Senge describes a number of components of team learning. The first is dialogue. Drawing on conversations with physicist, David Bohm, he identifies three conditions that are necessary for dialogue to occur:

1. All participants must "suspend their assumptions;"

2. all participants must "regard one another as colleagues;" and

3. there must be a facilitator (at least until teams develop these skills) "who holds the context of the dialogue."

Contributors to The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook declare that team learning "as creating courteous behaviors, improving communication, becoming better able to perform work tasks together, and building strong relationships. Just as teams pool their knowledge and then examine it from many different angles, so have the practitioners of OD shared their different perspectives and experiences. One such OD "strategist" is Juanita Brown, who has coached organizations toward innovative ways to involve employees. Looking back on groups with which she has worked, she recounts those experiences where team building turned into team learning. She draws inspiration from the community development movement and from the study of voluntary organizations. (Senge, Fieldbook,)

Brown expressed her belief in the importance of dialogue as follows:

"Strategic dialogue is built on the operating principle that the stakeholders in any system already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges." The 'community of inquiry' can extend beyond employees to include unions, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, becoming a "dynamic and reinforcing process which helps create and strengthen the 'communities of commitment' which Fred Kofman and Peter Senge emphasize lie at the heart of learning organizations capable of leading the way towards a sustainable future."