Character strength · Justice
Teamwork as a character strength: meaning and examples
The short answer: teamwork, also called citizenship or loyalty, is working well as part of a group: doing your share, being loyal to the people around you, and caring about the group's success as well as your own. It is one of the 24 character strengths of the VIA classification, in the Justice family: the strengths of living well in a group.
What teamwork looks like
People with a lot of teamwork tend to:
- pull their weight without being asked twice
- put the group's goal ahead of personal credit
- stay loyal to their team, club or community through rough patches
- help a teammate finish before celebrating their own part
- follow agreed rules even when nobody is checking
In everyday life
At work, teamwork is the reliable colleague: shows up, meets deadlines, shares information, and makes the team stronger without needing the spotlight. Outside work, it might be a sports team, a choir, a building committee or a volunteer group.
Teamwork also includes being a good member of a wider community: voting, picking up litter, doing your part in shared spaces.
Teamwork and the strengths close to it
- Fairness makes sure everyone in the group is treated evenly.
- Leadership organizes the group. Teamwork is what makes a group worth organizing.
- Kindness and teamwork overlap in the small favors that keep a group running smoothly.
When teamwork is overdone, or underused
Like every strength, teamwork works best in the right amount. Overdone, teamwork can become going along with the group when it is wrong, or loyalty that excuses bad behavior. Underused, people work alone even when a team would do better, and miss the satisfaction of a shared win.
The aim is loyalty that still leaves room to speak up.
Is teamwork one of your top strengths?
Ask yourself:
- Do you feel most satisfied when your team succeeds, even if your part was small?
- Are you the one people count on to do their share?
- Do you stay committed to groups you belong to when things get difficult?
If you answered yes to most of these, teamwork may be one of your signature strengths. The only way to know how it compares with your other 23 is to rank them.
Find your top strengths with the free test
Where this comes from
The 24 character strengths were described by psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004). Happy Me's assessment uses public-domain questions from the International Personality Item Pool and is not affiliated with the VIA Institute.