Team Building for Newly Formed and Merged Teams
A newly formed team is not yet a team. It is a group of individuals who happen to share a reporting line, an objective, or an organisational chart. The transition from that collection of individuals into a genuine team, one that trusts each other, communicates well, and works together effectively, does not happen automatically. It happens through shared experience over time, and it can be accelerated or left to chance.
Teams come together new for many reasons: a department is created, a project brings people together, a restructuring reshuffles the organisation, or two organisations merge and their teams must combine. Each of these situations creates a team that has to build cohesion from a standing start, often while also delivering results. This guide looks at what newly formed and merged teams specifically need, why the early period matters so much, and how team building can help a new team become a real team faster and more reliably than leaving it to chance.
Why the Early Period Matters So Much The early period of a new team disproportionately shapes what the team becomes. The patterns of communication, trust, and collaboration that form in the first weeks and months tend to persist. Investing deliberately in team building early, when the team is still forming its habits, is far more effective than trying to repair dysfunctional patterns once they have set. |
What Makes New Teams Different
New teams face a specific set of challenges that established teams have already worked through. Understanding these challenges is the starting point for helping a new team form well.
No shared history to draw on
Established teams have a bank of shared experience: they know how each other works, who is good at what, how to interpret each other's communication, and how to navigate disagreement. New teams have none of this. Every interaction is a first interaction, and members are still forming their impressions of each other. This absence of shared history means new teams often work more slowly and tentatively at first, as people feel their way into how the team operates.
Uncertainty about roles and norms
In a new team, the informal norms that govern how a team works, how decisions get made, how conflict is handled, how much informality is appropriate, have not yet been established. This uncertainty can create hesitation and occasional friction as different people bring different assumptions from their previous teams. Until the team develops its own shared norms, this ambiguity is a source of inefficiency and mild tension.
Guardedness until trust is established
People in new teams tend to be somewhat guarded, which is a natural and sensible response to not yet knowing whether it is safe to be open. They may be reluctant to admit uncertainty, ask for help, or voice disagreement until they have a sense of how the team will respond. This guardedness limits the open communication that effective teams rely on, and it lifts only as trust develops.
The Specific Challenge of Merged Teams
Merged teams, where two previously separate teams or organisations come together, face all the challenges of new teams plus an additional layer that can be considerably more difficult: each group arrives with an existing identity, existing ways of working, and often existing loyalties.
Two cultures meeting
When teams merge, they bring different established cultures, different norms, and different assumptions about how things should be done. These differences are often invisible to the people who hold them, because established ways of working feel simply like the normal way rather than one way among several. When two such groups combine, the friction of these unstated differences can be significant, and it can be misread as personal difficulty rather than cultural difference.
In-group and out-group dynamics
Merged teams frequently develop, at least initially, a tendency to identify with the original group rather than the new combined team. People may think in terms of us and them, defaulting to trust their original colleagues over their new ones. This dynamic is natural but works directly against the cohesion the merged team needs. Left unaddressed, it can persist for a long time and quietly undermine how the merged team functions.
Anxiety and uncertainty
Mergers and restructurings often carry a degree of anxiety, because they can bring uncertainty about roles, status, and job security. This emotional undercurrent affects how people show up in the new team, sometimes making them more guarded, more competitive, or more resistant than they would otherwise be. Team building for merged teams that ignores this emotional reality tends to feel tone-deaf and can even backfire.
What New and Merged Teams Need From Team Building
Given these challenges, team building for new and merged teams should be designed to address them directly rather than being generic. Several priorities matter particularly.
Getting to know each other as people
New teams need to build the basic familiarity that established teams take for granted. Team building that helps people understand each other, their backgrounds, working styles, strengths, and what they care about, accelerates the personal knowledge that underpins trust. This is foundational, and it is often more valuable early on than activities focused on performance or task, because the personal connection has to come first.
Building a shared identity
For merged teams especially, team building should help the combined group begin to see itself as one team rather than two groups sharing a space. Activities that create shared experiences, common reference points, and a sense of collective identity help shift the us-and-them dynamic toward a single team identity. This shared identity is not built through being told to feel like one team; it is built through experiencing being one team.
Establishing how the team will work
New teams benefit from deliberately establishing their norms rather than letting them form haphazardly. Team building can create space for a new team to discuss and agree how it wants to work: how it will communicate, make decisions, handle disagreement, and hold each other accountable. Making these norms explicit early, rather than leaving them to emerge through trial and error, helps a new team work well together sooner.
Creating early psychological safety
Because guardedness limits new teams, helping people feel safe to be open earlier is valuable. Team building that lets people show vulnerability in low-stakes ways, admit they do not know something, ask for help, or share a mistake, begins to establish that openness is safe in this team. This early psychological safety pays dividends as the team faces real challenges together.
The Priority for Merged Teams For merged teams, the single most important goal of early team building is usually to begin dissolving the us-and-them dynamic and replacing it with a shared identity. Until people stop instinctively dividing into original groups and start seeing themselves as one team, the merged team will underperform regardless of individual talent. Shared experience is what shifts this, which is exactly what good team building provides. |
Timing and Sequence
For new and merged teams, when team building happens matters as much as what it involves. The early period is the highest-leverage time, when the team is still forming its patterns and is most open to shaping them deliberately. Team building that comes early, while the team is still finding its feet, tends to have more influence on what the team becomes than the same activity delivered months later.
A sensible sequence often begins with personal connection and getting to know each other, moves toward building shared identity and agreeing how the team will work, and then addresses the specific collaboration the team's actual work requires. Rushing to task-focused team building before the personal foundation exists tends to be less effective, because the trust and familiarity that make collaboration work have not yet been built. Building the foundation first, then the collaboration on top, generally serves new teams better.
Regional Considerations for the UAE and KSA
In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, new and merged teams are often also highly multicultural, combining people from many national and cultural backgrounds. This adds a dimension to the team formation challenge, because the differences to be bridged are not only individual and organisational but also cultural. Team building for new teams in the region benefits from attention to cultural inclusion, helping people from different backgrounds understand and work with each other, alongside the general work of team formation.
The region's business environment also sees frequent organisational change: new entities forming, rapid growth creating new teams, and restructuring linked to transformation agendas. This makes new and merged team building a recurring need rather than an occasional one, and organisations that develop a reliable approach to helping new teams form well hold a genuine advantage in a context where new teams are constantly being created.
The Bottom Line
A newly formed team is a group of individuals who have not yet become a team, and the process of becoming one can be accelerated or left to chance. New teams need to build the personal familiarity, shared identity, agreed norms, and early psychological safety that established teams already have. Merged teams need all of this plus deliberate work to dissolve the us-and-them dynamic and build a single shared identity from two separate groups.
The early period matters most, because the patterns a team forms early tend to persist. Team building delivered deliberately and early, sequenced to build personal foundation before task collaboration, helps a new team become a real team faster and more reliably. For UAE and KSA organisations, where new and merged teams form frequently and are often highly multicultural, a strong approach to new-team formation is a capability worth building, because the need for it arises again and again.
