I played the evil member of a largely good party a few years back. In a group with a cleric/rogue of the nature god, bookish wizard of the holiest of the holy gods, paladin of the same holier-than-thou god, and a bard of the annoying god, I played a sorceror from the Blood War trapped in this realm due to a planar mishap. To keep the group working from day one, my character, Christian, had an amulet that hid his alignment, which kept the paladin from kicking me out immediately. We did, however, butt heads on pretty much everything.
When I started playing Christian, though, I had the plan to have him redeemed before the game's end. So while he was evil, it was more casual evil, than pure baby-killing evil. Lawful Evil; Christian was prone to entering in agreements with unsavory characters, like the vampire baron, and then finding loopholes with which to double-cross him. He went about the same goals the party had via other means.
An elven village was under attack by the undead. Christian's latest conquest was an elven priestess, and to his chagrin, he didn't want anything bad to happen to her. While everyone else's plan was to make a stand in the village and fight off the undead, Christian's first idea was to burn the forest down around them so the undead couldn't approach, but keep the fires from spreading to the village itself. Mildly evil, yeah.
Important; the GM and I worked out ahead of time that, while Christian would do things his way, I would make a conscious effort not to screw the group over, and they'd do the same for me. If my plan for Christian would be completely against what they were doing, Christian would be talked out of his plan, or his imp familiar would report back that the rain would prevent them from making a good barrier, something like that. We never let this get adversarial, because then it's not fun. The only-with-words party conflict between Christian and the paladin, though, was great fun for its character development and creative insults.
So yes, I do agree with good common goals as a great way to tie things together. I always find it awesome when mortal rivals have to team up together to stop an even greater threat (the first thing I think of is Goku and Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z, honestly). I'd also make sure the characters don't plan on coming to blows (unless that's part of the point), and then think about where you'd like for them to end up, as far as development goes, and see what you can do to help with that.
But above all else, make sure you all have fun with it!