Microsoft Teams: How to disable Teams Creation

When enabling the Teams license in Microsoft 365, every member within the organisation can create new teams. Giving your employees the possibility to create teams themselves and according to their needs increases acceptance of the newly introduced tool.

Nevertheless, it can lead to problems if many employees have high permission levels for team creation. Often it is not clearly defined when it is necessary to create a team and when a channel or even just a chat is sufficient. It can also lead to duplicate teams with the same purpose being created more than once.

Team creation can quickly cause uncontrolled growth that confuses your employees with too many teams without any real benefit.

Find out how Parking Zürich solved this problem – read our case study.

To prevent uncontrolled growth of Teams, it is a best practice of Microsoft Teams Governance to disable the creation of teams. However, there are disadvantages to completely stopping users from creating teams. Strict restrictions can demotivate users or make them lose interest.

Why should IT admins control team creation in Microsoft Teams?

If you manage a Microsoft 365 tenant, you have probably seen this pattern: after a few months, there are hundreds of teams with overlapping names, unclear owners and abandoned channels. Users cannot find the right place for their work, and support tickets pile up.

Many IT admins start searching for ways to “disable team creation Microsoft 365” just to stop this growth. But completely blocking team creation often shifts the problem elsewhere: shadow IT, private tools or manual workarounds.

This is where a Microsoft Teams Governance Tool can help. Instead of simply turning team creation off, you can guide it: clear rules, standard templates, and transparent ownership for every new team.

What is a controlled version of team creation in Microsoft Teams?

Instead, to prevent users from creating teams in an unsupervised way, we recommend implementing a controlled version of teams creation with Teams Manager, offering a request and approval process for teams.

With Teams Manager, every new workspace starts with a Teams creation approval workflow. Users request a new team with a short form, approvers check the purpose and sensitivity, and the Team is then created from a standard template with the right naming, settings and lifecycle.

For IT admins this means:

• fewer unnecessary teams,
• clear ownership,
• consistent governance without manual scripts every time.

Curious to see how Teams Manager controls Team creation?

How to disable teams creation in Microsoft Teams in 3 steps

Import-Module Microsoft.Graph.Beta.Identity.DirectoryManagement
Import-Module Microsoft.Graph.Beta.Groups


Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "Directory.ReadWrite.All", "Group.Read.All"


$GroupName = "<YourGroupName>"
$AllowGroupCreation = "False"


$settingsObjectID = (Get-MgBetaDirectorySetting | Where-object -Property Displayname -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id


if(!$settingsObjectID)
{
    $params = @{
	  templateId = "62375ab9-6b52-47ed-826b-58e47e0e304b"
	  values = @(
		    @{
			      name = "EnableMSStandardBlockedWords"
			      value = "true"
		    }
	 	    )
	    }
	
    New-MgBetaDirectorySetting -BodyParameter $params
	
    $settingsObjectID = (Get-MgBetaDirectorySetting | Where-object -Property Displayname -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).Id
}


 
$groupId = (Get-MgBetaGroup | Where-object {$_.displayname -eq $GroupName}).Id


$params = @{
	templateId = "62375ab9-6b52-47ed-826b-58e47e0e304b"
	values = @(
		@{
			name = "EnableGroupCreation"
			value = $AllowGroupCreation
		}
		@{
			name = "GroupCreationAllowedGroupId"
			value = $groupId
		}
	)
}


Update-MgBetaDirectorySetting -DirectorySettingId $settingsObjectID -BodyParameter $params


(Get-MgBetaDirectorySetting -DirectorySettingId $settingsObjectID).Values

Note: In order to execute the script, you need the preview module for Powershell ‘AzureADPreview’. If you already have installed the AzureAD module, you need to uninstall it first.

Watch this video for a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to deactivate teams creation in Microsoft Teams:

The creation of teams is now disabled for users. This AzureAD Security Group will be the only one that can later create teams. Note that Global Admin members can also still create Microsoft Teams.

Overview of the 3 steps

Step	Action	Result	Notes
1	Create security group	Defines who is still allowed to create groups and teams	Use a clear name, e.g. “TeamCreationAdmins”
2	Add members	Grants selected admins permission to create new groups and teams	Add only admins or power users
3	Execute the PowerShell script	Disables group and team creation for all users outside this group	Requires sufficient directory permissions

Example: how Parking Zürich stopped uncontrolled team growth

Parking Zürich used Teams Manager to stop uncontrolled growth in Microsoft Teams. Felix Peider,​ Head of IT at Parking Zürich AG, says:

“Through Teams Manager, we implement structured guidelines and approval processes for the creation of teams.“

Read more about how Parking Zürich prevents uncontrolled teams creation with Teams Manager!

In this project, simply running the script to disable teams creation would not have been enough. They needed an approval process, templates, naming conventions and lifecycle rules. All of that was implemented with Teams Manager as a central Microsoft Teams governance tool on top of the technical configuration.

FAQ: disabling Team creation in Microsoft Teams

Now you know how to disable teams creation. Teams Manager offers easy controls not just for team creation, but also for most admin problems in MS Teams.

If you want to see a request-based process in action, book a Teams Manager Demo!

Walk through the full workflow for controlled team creation, templates and lifecycle policies together with one of our experts.