Data for this study were obtained from a division of a large beverage
company in China, and all of the division’s 45 teams, including 338
employees and 45 team leaders, were invited to participate. Employees
worked in different functional teams such as planning, marketing, research
and development, filling and packaging, quality control, after-sale service,
and recycling.We assessed whether the work groups in the beverage company
qualify as “real” teams based on Hackman’s (2002) criteria. We
found that each group has a common leader to supervise and monitor the
process, a common goal, stable team membership (minimum team tenure
greater than 10 months), and high task interdependence (M = 5.29 on a
1–7 scale; SD=.97).