While numerous other instruments exist that attempt to meet either research or consulting demands, the TDS is able to satisfy both aspirations. There are literally dozens of consultant-developed instruments available for the diagnostic assessment of team dynamics. Typically, these instruments ask members to assess their teams on those dimensions that their developers assume to be most consequential for performance and most amenable to improvement through consultative intervention. Instruments of this type generally have high face validity, but their content tends to be based more on the observations and inferences of practitioners than on established research and theory, and the factors they assess are not necessarily those that actually are most consequential for performance. By contrast, scholar-developed measures of team attributes and dynamics abound in the research literature. Unlike consultant-developed instruments, such measures focus exclusively on those variables that are of research interest to the scholars who devise them; other factors that might be useful in generating a robust team diagnosis are not assessed. Because scholarly research requires that measures be highly reliable, scales tend to be lengthy and can take considerable time for respondents to complete.   In order to achieve both goals, the TDS has some items that are drawn from existing measures but it is also tailored in such a way that it has added items which makes it more context-specific, and thus brings together the best of both worlds.