Building Teams to Self-Manage and Grow. Self-directed teams — sometimes called self-managed teams, empowered work units, or autonomous work teams — function in their truest sense without supervisory authority.
Team members are interdependent, but the role of supervisor usually is missing. A self-directed team is as much a team as any other, but it has a unique management structure — no supervisor. By comparison, a regular work group reports to a supervisor who is part of the group. In many such cases, the supervisor does much of the same work that the group members do, or he performs a higher level of the overall work that the group must accomplish.
Team. A team at work A team comprises a group of people or animals linked in a common purpose.
Teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks that are high in complexity and have many interdependent subtasks. A group in itself does not necessarily constitute a team.