Which of the following is the biggest barrier to team effectiveness according to business professionals?

1. Career development
2. 11 Common Barriers to Teamwork and How You Can Overcome Them

By Indeed Editorial Team

Updated June 21, 2022 | Published September 29, 2021

Updated June 21, 2022

Published September 29, 2021

The Indeed Editorial Team comprises a diverse and talented team of writers, researchers and subject matter experts equipped with Indeed's data and insights to deliver useful tips to help guide your career journey.

Successful collaboration can allow teams to produce innovative solutions to complex problems and work efficiently toward shared goals. While collaboration is often highly valued in workplaces across industry lines, creating a cohesive team environment in which professionals can effectively work together is sometimes challenging. If you're a professional seeking to improve your team's attempts at collaboration, it may be helpful to consider what barriers to teamwork might be affecting your workflow. In this article, we explain what barriers to teamwork are and outline 11 common obstacles your team may be facing, including how to overcome them.

Related: Workplace Collaborations: Definitions and Methods for Improvement

What are barriers to teamwork?

Barriers to teamwork are obstacles that make it challenging for groups of professionals to collaborate and achieve their shared objectives. Collaboration typically requires team members to have healthy professional relationships with one another, agree upon goals, take responsibility for their respective duties and work together to problem-solve when faced with roadblocks.

Without these essential elements, teams often experience barriers that make their attempts at collaboration unsuccessful. Fortunately, through acknowledging these barriers and understanding how to overcome them, teams can work together more effectively to produce high-quality work.

Related: How To Increase Collaboration in the Workplace

11 barriers to teamwork and how to overcome them

There are various barriers that teams may face when working together. Here are 11 of the most common impediments to teamwork that groups of professionals face, including strategies for overcoming them:

1. Ineffective leadership

For teams to work together effectively, they need leaders who can guide them, offer their insight and encourage collaboration on a consistent basis. Therefore, ineffective leadership can result in teams feeling disconnected and unmotivated, which can greatly impact their ability to work together. Leaders can take charge of such situations by offering more opportunities for teamwork, helping team members develop their skills and finding ways to incentivize successful collaboration.

Read more: What Is a Collaborative Leader?

2. Goal confusion

Successful collaboration often begins with the establishment of shared goals that team members can work toward together. With this, teams may experience challenges if they don't fully understand the objectives of their work or agree upon them. To overcome goal confusion, teams can establish a standardized protocol for setting goals, analyzing them and outlining workflow to achieve them efficiently.

3. Communication gaps

Working alongside other team members requires professionals to have strong communication skills that allow them to connect with colleagues, explain their perspectives, listen to others and relay expectations. Communication gaps can result in team members lacking clarity about expectations and their responsibilities. Teams can work deliberately toward honing their communication skills to fill these gaps and collaborate more effectively.

4. Lack of trust

To work together toward a set of shared goals, professionals on a team often need to trust one another and develop respectful relationships through which they have confidence in each other's abilities. Without trust, team members may not feel comfortable offering feedback or sharing their perspectives throughout collaborative activities. Even more, a lack of trust can result in miscommunication and conflict that may further impede teamwork. Professionals can more effectively foster trustful relationships through team-building exercises and regular opportunities for collaboration.

Related: Teamwork and Collaboration: What They Are and How To Improve Them

5. Inequitable decision-making

In a team environment, it's common for a single team member to assume more responsibility than others and dominate decision-making duties. This inequitable environment is often a result of certain team members being more extroverted, having more advanced abilities or tending toward an independent work style. With this, though, team members who are more introverted and tend toward a collaborative work style may start to contribute less if they believe that their ideas aren't worthwhile. Teams can overcome inequitable decision-making processes by democratizing workflow and ensuring all team members can offer input equally.

6. Team size

Small teams—those that consist of three to six professionals—often collaborate more efficiently than larger teams. This is because smaller groups usually have more opportunities to interact with one another, develop healthy relationships and share responsibilities equally. With this, when a team is too large, members may experience challenges with sharing duties and understanding what role to play. To avoid barriers from group size, leaders can set a limit on the number of professionals assigned to each team and ensure all members understand their respective purposes.

7. Accountability issues

Some teams face challenges with accountability, especially in cases where certain team members regularly underperform and refuse to take responsibility for how their actions affect a team's progress. With greater accountability, team members may feel more validated in their perspectives and be more accommodating toward other team members' struggles with meeting expectations. Therefore, to overcome this barrier, teams can create processes for tracking workflow and keeping all team members accountable for their specific duties.

8. Poor conflict resolution skills

While teams may face conflict as they work collaboratively toward shared goals, it's important that professionals know how to find resolutions and move forward together. Without conflict resolution skills, this can be a challenging feat. In order to overcome this barrier, teams can practice resolving conflicts together through targeted professional development workshops and in real time using a predetermined process for doing so.

Related: 6 Qualities That Make a Great Team Player

9. Workflow mismanagement

Some teams find it challenging to progress past the point of defining goals and understanding the tasks they need to complete to reach such goals. To work together effectively, teams need knowledge of how their workflow is to operate and what role each team member can play in accomplishing a shared goal. To properly manage workflow, teams may consider using tools like mapping or appointing a project coordinator to establish a clear pathway to success.

10. Physical separation

With advances in technology over the past few decades, many teams work remotely. This type of physical separation can make teamwork a complex venture as professionals aren't in proximity to one another and often must be more purposeful with their communication than otherwise. Teams can overcome the barrier of physical separation by implementing digital tools that ease the burden of collaboration in a remote workspace and by meeting in person at regular intervals if possible.

11. Lack of incentives

Some professionals find it easier to work on their tasks independently than in a full-group environment. Despite this, there are major benefits that organizations can enjoy through collaborative work. Therefore, it's important for teams to receive incentives for working together. Team and organizational leaders can incentivize collaboration by offering rewards like monetary bonuses, praise and extra paid time off (PTO) to those professionals who work together and achieve high-level goals.

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