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Team interaction involves "soft" interpersonal skills including communication, negotiation, leadership, and motivation - in contrast to technical skills directly involved with the job at hand. Depending on the type of team building, the novel tasks can encourage or specifically teach interpersonal team skills to increase team performance.

Team building generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development. The related field of team management refers to techniques, processes and tools for organizing and coordinating a team towards a common goal - as well as the inhibitors to teamwork and ways to remove, mitigate or overcome them.

Several well-known approaches to team management have come out of academic work.

The forming-storming-norming-performing model posits four stages of new team development to reach high performance. Some team activities are designed to speed up (or improve) this process in the safe team development environment. Belbin Team Types can be assessed to gain insight into an individual's natural behavioral tendencies in a team context, and can be used to create and develop better functioning teams. Team Sociomapping is an visual approach to team process and structure modelling. This model is based on social networks approach and improves the team performance by improvement of specific cooperation ties between the people.

In the organizational development context, a team may embark on a process of self-assessment to gauge its effectiveness and improve its performance. To assess itself, a team seeks feedback from group members to find out both its current strengths and weakness.

To improve its current performance, feedback from the team assessment can be used to identify gaps between the desired state and the current state, and to design a gap-closure strategy. Team development can be the greater term containing this assessment and improvement actions, or as a component of organizational development.

Another way is to allow for personality assessment amongst the team members, so that they will have a better understanding of their working style, as well as their fellow team mates.

A structured teambuilding plan is a good tool to implement team bonding and thus, team awareness. These may be introduced by companies that does teambuilding sessionsm, or done internally by the human resource department.

A team-building consultant is responsible for each component of a team building intervention. He will likely interact with the team once, or for a limited number of times. During these first contacts, actively assessing the team, making recommendations, and providing activities (exercises that compose a team building intervention) for the team are the main responsibilities of the consultant. Moreover, usually a written proposal is required after the evaluation process, in which the trainer indicates how he or she would go about improving the team’s performance. Once the organization and consultant determine which recommendations to utilize (if not all), the consultant is then responsible for providing a useful intervention that will transfer back into the organizational setting. This responsibility usually requires the consultant to create a detailed plan of events, while allowing for flexibility. After the intervention has been employed, the consultant will typically evaluate the team-building program and communicate the results to the organization.

The goal of most research on group development is to learn why and how small groups change over time. To do this, researchers examine patterns of change and continuity in groups over time. Aspects of a group that might be studied include the quality of the output produced by a group, the type and frequency of its activities, its cohesiveness, the existence of conflict, etc. A number of theoretical models have been developed to explain how certain groups change over time. Listed below are some of the most common models. In some cases, the type of group being considered influenced the model of group development proposed as in the case of therapy groups. In general, some of these models view group change as regular movement through a series of "stages," while others view them as "phases" that groups may or may not go through and which might occur at different points of a group's history. Attention to group development over time has been one of the differentiating factors between the study of ad hoc groups and the study of teams such as those commonly used in the workplace, the military, sports and many other contexts.