[1] A high-performance team can be defined as a group of people with specific roles and complementary talents and skills, aligned with and committed to a common purpose, who consistently show high levels of collaboration and innovation, produce superior results, and extinguish radical or extreme opinions that could be damaging.
Later, leadership strategies (coordinating, coaching, empowering, and supporting) were connected to each stage to help facilitate teams to high performance.
Finally, self-governing teams are designed with high control and responsibility to execute a task or manage processes.
[5] Given the importance of team-based work in today's economy, much focus has been brought in recent years to use evidence-based organizational research to pinpoint more accurately to the defining attributes of high-performance teams.
The FIRO-B test helps an individual identify their interpersonal compatibilities with these needs which can be directly correlated to their performance in a high-performance team.
[8] First described in detail by the Tavistock Institute, UK, in the 1950s, HPTs gained popular acceptance in the US by the 1980s, with adoption by organizations such as General Electric, Boeing, Digital Equipment Corporation (now HP), and others.
In each of these cases, major change was created through the shifting of organizational culture, merging the business goals of the organization with the social needs of the individuals.
With this failure, HPTs fell out of general favor by 1995, and the term high-performance began to be used in a promotional context, rather than a performance-based one.
[10] With these new tools, organizations such as Kraft Foods, General Electric, Exelon, and the US government have focused new attention on high-performance teams.