Cultivating Positive Project Teams: Accelerating Time to Team Formation

High technology project teams must form, innovate, execute and deliver complex solutions at continually increasing speeds to meet market demands. This paper explores how building team positivity, connectedness and efficacy can accelerate team formation and establish an expansive environment for ongoing collaboration and innovation. A program framework for forming positive project teams utilizing empirically-based positive interventions and appreciative inquiry theory is presented. By using appreciative inquiry as a team-development intervention we can help new teams create generative images for themselves based on an affirmative understanding of their past. Team members come together in a safe and encouraging space and get to know each others’ strengths, passions, experience and styles while building a vision and action plan for their most positive future. By investing in building positive project teams during team formation, businesses can accelerate team formation, achieve greater team satisfaction and increase overall performance outcomes.