The term teamwork has graced countless motivational posters and office walls. However, although teamwork is often easy to observe, it is somewhat more difficult to describe and yet more difficult to produce. At a broad level, teamwork is the process through which team members collaborate to achieve task goals. Teamwork refers to the activities through which team inputs translate into team outputs such as team effectiveness and satisfaction. In this article, we describe foundational research underlying current research on teamwork. We examine the evolution of team process models and outline primary teamwork dimensions. We discuss selection, training, and design approaches to enhancing teamwork, and note current applications of teamwork research in real-world settings.

In battle, you may draw a small circle [of people] around a soldier. . . . These [persons] primarily will determine whether he rallies or fails, advances or falls back.

—U.S. Army Col. S. L. A. Marshall (1947, p. 154)

Probably the most important thing I’ve learned up here is the importance of teamwork.

—NASA Astronaut Douglas Wheelock (2007, p. 1)

Although these statements are separated by some 70 years, they both allude to the importance of teams in achieving important goals. Moreover, these statements point to past accomplishments on the battlefields of World War II and to future challenges in the exploration of space. We study teams and teamwork for several reasons. First, teams are viewed as central building blocks to accomplish tasks in a wide variety of applied contexts—the military (Dalenberg, Vogelaar, & Beersma, 2009), spaceflight (Salas et al., 2015), health care (Hughes et al., 2016), aviation (Littlepage, Hein, Moffett, Craig, & Georgiou, 2016), sports (McEwan & Beauchamp, 2014), and other domains. As Marks, Mathieu, and Zaccaro (2001) noted, “Much of the...