Team members are assigned roles within the context. For example, a team has guest, member, and manager roles with varying permissions by default:

A role relates members in the context to information and activities managed in that context. Roles help group people who have similar duties in the context in a way that makes sense for the team. When people are invited to become a member of an application context, the context manager must assign at least one role, such as Designer or Reviewer, to each person. Members in a context can be assigned to more than one role. As soon as a user is assigned to a role on a team, the user can access the context. To view the members and their roles, navigate to the Members table on the Team page.

With each defined role, a corresponding system group is automatically created in the background. These system groups reference context teams roles in areas such as access control policies. Your organization or system administrator is able to access and manipulate these groups after they are created. Unlike system groups, user-defined groups are created manually using the Participant Administration utility. User-defined groups can be created and maintained in the organization and site contexts or through an enterprise directory server. If a large number of users need to be added to a context team role, you can create a user-defined group and add the group to the appropriate role.