The current growth of scientific knowledge has intensified the problem of research performance assessment. However, there is still a lack of the unified assessment methodology, largely due to the changing nature of modern science. At present, knowledge is increasingly generated by collective actors - research teams, rather than by individual scientists. These collective actors constitute a complex self-developing and evolutionary system, making its evaluation rather problematic. By using a goal-oriented approach, this paper seeks to identify specific characteristics of various research team types and suggests a qualitative criterion against which their research performance can be measured. It is shown that a research team forms and evolves around a goal that is shared by all its members; this common goal defines both structural-managerial characteristics of such a collective actor and qualitative attributes of attained research objectives. The obtained results - research team models and the qualitative criterion of their performance - can be used as a platform for further research into the cross-cultural, ethical, and economic dimensions of research teams, as well as for assessing research performance of actual teams.