Team Building and Development in a Matrix Environment

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There are many kinds of teams. A functional team is a permanent team established to conduct operational activities for a particular part of the organization, such as finance, sales, and marketing. Functional teams are permanent in the sense that they have no specified time limit, as they are needed to keep the business running. A project team, on the other hand, is brought together for a discrete period of time to achieve a defined goal. At the end of the project, the team is disbanded. Project teams are often matrix in nature, staffed by members taken from diverse functional teams in order to achieve the project goal. When the project manager has a high degree of authority this is known as a “strong matrix”; when functional managers have stronger authority this is known as a “weak matrix.”

In all organizational structures, there are many “teams within teams.” For example, in the case of a manager, there might be several teams within the overall team:

• The manager and the whole team
• The manager and each individual in the management team
• The manager and all of the management team
•  The manager and his or her peers in other departments
• Each management team individual and their direct reports

This is complicated enough if the structure is a well-defined functional hierarchy. However, a matrix …

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