Teamwork is essential for competing in today's global arena, where individual perfection is not as desirable as a high level of collective performance. In knowledge based enterprises, teams are the norm rather than the exception. A critical feature of most teams is that they have a significant degree of empowerment, or decision-making authority. There are many different kinds of teams: top management teams, focused task forces, self-directed teams, concurrent engineering teams, product/service development and/or launch teams, quality improvement teams, and so on.