A series of articles about high performance teams here:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/high-performance-teams-teamicide
Some excerpt...
For the people in the team:
High performance groups emerge when people have the courage to make commitments to co-create a new and different future.
For the Management:
When the management practices are right, then you have lots of them. That has happened in Toyota & Honda, and in software development. How much is "lots"? Hard to say precisely. Toyota/Honda constitute about a quarter of the car industry. In software, perhaps a third of all software development is now done in various variants of self-organizing teams, under the labels "Agile", "Scrum" or "XP", and many of these progress to become high-performance teams."