Taskwork vs Teamwork: The Two Engines of High-Performing Teams
What if your team’s missed deadlines aren’t a skill problem, but a coordination problem? Taskwork and teamwork are different—and both must be designed, developed, and measured.
Executive Summary
Most teams underperform not because people lack ability or effort, but because organizations confuse two distinct kinds of work. Taskwork is the technical, role-specific work individuals do to produce output. Teamwork is the set of processes—communication, coordination, decision rules, conflict management, and knowledge sharing—that converts individual contributions into collective value. Strong taskwork without teamwork = skilled silos. Strong teamwork without taskwork = smooth processes, weak output. High performance requires intentionally developing both engines.
The IPO Lens: Where Taskwork and Teamwork Live
Richard Hackman’s Input–Process–Output (IPO) framing helps:
Inputs: People, skills, task design, leadership, resources. (Sets the performance ceiling.)
Processes: How the team coordinates, communicates, decides, and learns. (Determines how much ceiling is realized.)
Outputs: Quality, sustainability, learning, and member experience.
Taskwork sits mainly in inputs and technical processes; teamwork sits primarily in the process layer where potential is converted into results.
Taskwork: The “What” of Work
Definition & features
Domain expertise and technical execution (design, code, analysis, diagnosis).
Often possible with limited coordination.
Evaluated by accuracy, completeness, and technical quality.
Why it matters
No amount of teamwork rescues poor task skills.
Selection, training, and stretch assignments improve taskwork.
Common failure mode
Organizations staff technically capable people but assume results will follow automatically—often they don’t, because coordination gaps waste effort.
Teamwork: The “How” of Work
Definition & features
Communication clarity, role coordination, decision rules, conflict handling, psychological safety, transactive memory, shared mental models.
Multiplies taskwork by reducing duplication, surfacing expertise, and enabling rapid adaptation.
Why it matters
High-quality teamwork reduces errors, speeds delivery, and unlocks diverse perspectives.
Teamwork is learnable and coachable—processes and norms matter.
Common failure mode
Great individual contributors produce isolated outputs that never integrate; leadership blames motivation instead of improving coordination.
Invisible Engines: Shared Mental Models & Transactive Memory
Two invisible assets that make teamwork real:
Shared mental models: Common understanding of goals, task structure, risks, and strategy.
Transactive memory: Knowing who knows what (and how to reach them).
Teams with both align faster, route questions to experts, and recover from disruption quickly.
Diversity, Size, and Coordination Costs
Diversity increases solution space but only helps if the team can integrate differences (psychological safety + facilitation).
Team size raises coordination costs exponentially—bigger isn’t always better.
Design implication: As complexity, diversity, or size rises, invest proportionally more in teamwork practices (norms, roles, communication tools).
Practical Framework: Two Engines, One Responsibility
What managers should do:
Design for both — specify skills AND coordination rules up front.
Make teamwork visible — treat coordination, knowledge routing, and safety as measurable responsibilities.
Build shared understanding — joint planning, mapping dependencies, and “who knows what” exercises.
Watch three outputs — delivery quality, team willingness to work together again, individual learning.
Coach both engines — technical coaching for taskwork; facilitation and process coaching for teamwork.
Real-World Signal Checklist
Taskwork strong, teamwork weak: careful technical outputs, frequent integration bugs, missed assumptions.
Teamwork strong, taskwork weak: smooth meetings, low innovation, repeatable but shallow outputs.
Both strong: fast, adaptive, high-quality delivery and learning.
Ready to Build Both Engines?
Organization Learning Labs offers diagnostics, team design reviews, and coaching programs that develop task skills and teamwork processes together—so teams don’t just work well, they deliver reliably.
Suggested References
Hackman, J. R. (1987). The design of work teams. In J. W. Lorsch (Ed.), Handbook of Organizational Behavior.
Marks, M. A., Mathieu, J. E., & Zaccaro, S. J. (2001). A temporally based framework and taxonomy of team processes. Academy of Management Review.
Cooke, N. J., Salas, E., Cannon-Bowers, J. A. (2000). Teamwork and shared mental models. Human Factors.
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