Management Teams in Education: An unequal music

This paper aims to extend the debate about the value of teamwork and its implications for team leadership in education. It examines a range of studies of teamwork in different contexts in and outside education, in order to propose an agenda for future research on this topic. Comparisons are drawn in particular with studies of collaborative partnerships in groups of musicians working together. These highlight what is fundamental to all forms of collaboration through teamwork and what is distinctive in different settings. In particular, it challenges the potential of teamwork to engender synergy as a springboard for managerial action. It concludes by proposing a reinterpretation of the ideal of synergy, to render it more realisable in educational settings in the form of team learning, team talking and team thinking, all leading to increased team effectiveness and the achievement of the team's task.