Within Microsoft Teams there are two user roles:

1. Owner
2. Member

By default, a user who creates a new team is granted the owner status. In addition, owners and members can have moderator capabilities for a channel (provided that moderation has been set up). If a team is created from an existing Office 365 Group, permissions are inherited.

The table below shows the difference in permissions between an owner and a member:

	Team Owner	Team Member
Create team	Yes1	No
Leave team	Yes	Yes
Edit team name/description	Yes	No
Delete team	Yes	No
Add standard channel	Yes	Yes2
Edit standard channel name/description	Yes	Yes2
Delete standard channel	Yes	Yes2
*Add private channel	Yes	Yes2
*Edit private channel name/description	No	N/A
*Delete private channel	Yes	No
Add members	Yes3	No4
Request to add members	N/A	Yes5
Add apps	Yes	Yes2

In other words:

• Team owners can create teams unless they’ve been restricted from doing so.
• An owner can turn off these items at the team level, in which case members would not have access to them.
• After adding a member to a team, an owner can also promote a member to owner status. It is also possible for an owner to demote their own status to a member.
• Team members can add other members to a public team.
• While a team member can’t directly add members to a private team, they can request someone to be added to a team they’re already a member of. When a member requests someone to be added to a team, team owners receive an alert that they have a pending request that they can accept or deny.

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Moderator capabilities

In addition to other capabilities, team owners and members can have moderator capabilities for a channel (provided that moderation is turned on for a team). Moderators can start new posts in a channel and control whether team members can reply to existing channel messages. They can also control whether bots and connectors can submit channel messages.

Moderator capabilities are assigned at the channel level. Team owners have moderator capabilities by default. Team members have moderator capabilities turned off by default, but a team owner can give moderator capabilities for a channel to a team member. Moderators within a channel can add and remove other moderators within that channel.

For more information about moderator capabilities, see Set up and manage channel moderation in Microsoft Teams.

Assign a user role

To assign a user role, in Teams, select the team name and click More options > Manage team. On the Members tab, you can add members and choose owners and moderators (if you have sufficient permissions). For more information, see Change team settings in Teams.

Permissions to create teams

By default, all users with a mailbox in Exchange Online have permissions to create Office 365 groups and therefore a team within Microsoft Teams. You can have tighter control and restrict the creation of new teams and thus the creation of new Office 365 groups by delegating group creation and management rights to a set of users.