The terms 'group' and 'team' have been used interchangeably in both practitioner and academic circles. However, they differ slightly. Kozlowski and Bell (2003, p. 334) proposed that teams are 'collectives who exist to perform organizationally relevant tasks, share one or more common goals, interact socially, exhibit task interdependencies, maintain and manage boundaries, and are embedded in an organizational context that sets boundaries, constrains the team, and influences exchanges with other units in the broader entity'.
The key elements of this definition are that work teams are interdependent and operate in an organisational context that influences their functioning (Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp & Glison 2008).
On the other hand, work groups have come to mean 'social entities... who are embedded in one or more larger social systems and who perform tasks that affect others' (Guzzo & Dickson 1996, pp. 308-9).
The critical difference between the two concepts lays in how interdependent they are (van Vijfeijken, Kleingeld, van Tuijl, Algera & Thierry 2002).