Teamwork

You work well as a member of a group or team. You are loyal, reliable, and dedicated to helping your team achieve its goals.

What is Teamwork?

Teamwork is the ability and willingness to place overall group success as a higher priority than individual achievement. It is a willingness to work toward the team’s goals as opposed to one’s own self-interest. Those who demonstrate strengths in teamwork often work to help all group members find success. These individuals are willing to commit time and resources in order to help achieve the group’s goals.

This strength is associated with naturally positive feelings that accompany being a member of a family, team, school, ethnic group, or country. However, those positive feelings can come with bad behavior toward the “out-group” in the form of blind obedience, disparaging words, or prejudice. This is important to guard against by leveraging a person’s other positive character strengths.

Virtue: Justice. Strengths of justice refer to the optimal relationship between the individual and the group or community, rather than the more one-to-one relationships in the humanity virtue. These strengths include: teamwork, fairness, and leadership.

Individuals with this strength might be described as dedicated, collaborative, reliable, cooperative, or as a helper or partner.

The content on this page is written for adults — and the character card linked below is our Grades 9–12 version. Our curriculum is differentiated by grade level, from Pre-K–12. Request free lessons to get a closer look at how P2 teaches character strengths across grade levels.

Individuals with this strength are likely to think, feel, or behave in the following ways:

If we work together, we can accomplish major feats.

You owe it to your country to help make it better.

I want to help. It feels good to support my team.

By working together, we will be more successful.

It’s more important to me that we are successful than it is that I am successful.

Why does teamwork matter?

For individuals, teamwork often means deferring or delaying individual accomplishments in order to ensure that the group maintains a high level of success. Their commitment to the larger group effort makes them both good teammates and citizens. The positive feelings associated with being part of a larger whole can be highly beneficial and combat selfishness and egotism.

Our ability to work effectively within group structures is tied directly to the group’s ability to succeed. In schools and workplaces across the world, commitment to teamwork helps to further learning and achievement for all group members. Maintaining an “Other People Mindset” — and building positive relationships with other people — is important to any successful team environment.

Quotes on Teamwork

“I am a member of a team, and I rely on a team. I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.”

- Mia Hamm

“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For indeed, that’s all who ever have.”

- Margaret Mead

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?'”

- Martin Luther King Jr.

“Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”

- Henry Ford

Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence

You notice and value the world’s beauty and people’s skills. You don’t take things for granted.

Learn more