Teams

Ronald Recardo, Charles A Mention Iii, Jennifer Jolly, David Wade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781136359996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Is team-based management best for your business?
Will it help your organization meet the challenges of the twenty-first century to cut production costs, increase quality and service, and compete in the global economy?
his practical, immensely informative book will help you make that decision. Teams tells you: When to use teams and when not to use them.
What conditions must exist for teams to be successful.
Which teams are appropriate for a particular situation.
How to develop teams to meet the specific needs of your organization.

PART 1

Conceptual
Overview of
Teams

CHAPTER 1

Transitioning
to Teams

The Headlines

Every person in a medium- to large-size organization hears the word team or team building at least once every day. No less than 50 books praise the business worthiness of teams or team building in modern organizations. Americans have latched on to the concept “team” because the Japanese and the Europeans have used “teams” to improve productivity, customer satisfaction, and return on investment. Business, organizational, and psychological magazines and journals offer 20-point leads about the success of teams.

Teams are associated with a management model Ed Lawler calls high involvement, high participation (HIHP). HIHP emerged from sociotechnical theory, which originated in the coal mines of England during the early 1950s. This model suggests that increased productivity is achieved when workers are highly involved and participate in every aspect of the work they perform.

Though the self-directed teams approach, based on sociotechnical theory, faded in the 1970s, it re-emerged in many companies in the 1980s. Just-in-time UIT) production greatly revolutionized the factory floor in the late 1960s in Japan and did the same thing in the United States in the late 1970s. The quality and productivity work of W. Edward Deming, Joseph M. Juran, and Philip Crosby have all pointed out the positive effects of involving employees in decision making, productivity improvement, and customer satisfaction. However, for the last 35 years HIHP has been largely a curiosity, not a mainstream style of management, in spite of impressive results like the following:

•Xerox plants using teams have 30 percent higher productivity than self traditionally structured plants.

•GE plans to eliminate layers of management through the use of teams.

•Proctor & Gamble gets 30 to 40 percent higher productivity in its team based plants.

•Tektronix decreased product development time from 14 to 3 days using teams.

•GM reports a 30- to 40-percent increase in productivity in its self-directed, JIT plants

The HIHP model has seven basic tenets:

1.Employees must be actively involved in designing processes and structures of the organization. This means that employees must be given all the information they need to be successful.

2.Employees manage the team, management manages the boundaries and the environment outside the team.

3.Employees are in charge of production and services; they have the authority to start, stop, or fix production.

4.Employees are cross trained to do several jobs and compensated for learning new skills.

5.High-quality products and high-quality work life are inseparable.

6.Continuous process improvement must be a way of life.

7.To a greater degree than in the past, employees hire, fire, and determine pay rates.

Costs involved with the HIHP model include training both managers and employees to work in such environments and supporting employees during the transition. Often dual systems are needed when employees migrate from an old system to a new one. Human resource personnel must be on-call to provide advice, support, and tools for managing change. Human resources also must learn to deal straightforwardly with managerial retrenchment-the single, most common threat to selfdirected employees.

At about the same time sociotechnical theory was being developed in Europe, Douglas McGregor was beginning to wonder why traditional management systems, called the scientific management model (or command and control), didn’t work anymore. The scientific management model focused on efficiency or time and movement in production. In the 1970s another management model appeared called the performance management model. This model stipulated that getting stakeholder buy-in was critical to increased productivity. The underlying theory in performance management is that employees need to know where they are going, how they are going to get there, and what their roles and responsibilities are. From this model we now have goals and objectives in our business plans.

But how does an organization get from a command-and-control model of organization to a high involvement, high participation organization? This is a very frequently asked question, but it is the wrong question. The right question is, “What strategies can this organization use to improve productivity, increase customer satisfaction, cash flow, and employee satisfaction?” If the answer to this question is teams, this book will show you how to get there, what problems you will face, and what tools and techniques you can use. Figure 1.1 shows three different models of performance management.

Everything Is Not Roses

While all the praise for teams is warranted when they succeed, they often fail. The whole concept of teams is countercultural to the modern American organization. Everything from organizational culture and multitiered hierarchical structures to structures that reward individual performance can impede the successful implementation of teams. Organizations that have the best track records implementing successful teams also have a long history of implementing them. They have learned from their successes and failures.

Part of their success is based on why they chose to implement teams. They have learned through the years that for all the measurement done concerning teams, only four measures are ultimately important:

Figure 1.1. Performance management in three different models of participation.

1.Customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention

2.Increased productivity

3.Employee satisfaction

4.Improved cash flow

It is no coincidence that these same four performance measures also happen to be the major drivers for most high-performing organizations. When investigating whether or not teams are right for an organization, these four important performance measures should be kept in mind. If teams cannot positively impact these four performance measures, chances are time and resources will be wasted implementing teams.

What Is a Team?

There is no common agreement about what constitutes a team. We, the authors of this book, work in organizations where our co-workers are called teammates and are collectively called a team. But they are neither teammates nor do they work on a team. Our co-workers work in intact work groups whose interdependence is very limited. In fact, they have more interdependence with people in other departments than they do with their department co-workers. Many of these people can carry out their responsibilities without the help of anyone in their department. In some cases, no one else in their department can do what they do.

So why do they call themselves a team? From what we can tell, the everyday use of the word team is a positive euphemism that implies that group members work together in harmony and in a spirit of cooperation. This means, by simple definition, that most of the groups called teams are not really performing as a team. In our definition, teams have specific characteristics. We define a team as:

A unified, interdependent, cohesive group of people working together to achieve common objectives. Whereas each person may have a specialized function, each person also needs the resources and support of others and must be willing to forego individual autonomy to the extent necessary to accomplish those objectives.

A successful team will have the following characteristics:

•Definable membership. This means defining the roles, responsibilities, and limits of decision-making authority of each member. Each team member must also be consciously aware of the deliverables for which they are responsible.

•Membership stability. Teams must have a core of individual members who will be with the team throughout the team’s life. This core provides vides continuity.

•Common goals. Team members must understand the goals and objectives that they were brought together to achieve. Team sponsors and managers play a pivotal role in defining those goals and objectives and communicating them to team members. Of equal importance, the team members must think the goals are worthwhile so they will commit to achieving them.

•Sense of belonging. Team members must feel that they belong to the team and are full contributing members. This can be facilitated through ongoing discussions of team members’ perceptions, ideas, and concerns.

•Interdependence. Teams are only teams if there is a large degree of interdependence. That is, one team member’s performance is dependent upon the inputs and outputs of other team members.

•Interaction. Team members must interact with each other to be considered a team. Our experience suggests that the most successful teams usually occupy the same physical space. Close proximity helps to solidify and bond team members together.

•Common rewards. Having common performance metrics and reward systems is essential to a team’s long-term viability. Most organizations have compensation packages that reward individual, not team effort. This single factor is one of the most important underlying differences between members of intact work groups and teams. Intact work group members are in direct competition for rewards with one another, whereas team members work cooperatively together and should be compensated for what skills and knowledge they bring to the team, how well they work together as a team, and what the team accomplishes as a group.

Benefits of Teams

Some common benefits of teams are:

•Better solutions. A group of individuals brought together to solve a business problem is much more likely to come up with a better solution than is an individual working alone. The collective brain power of a team frequently out matches the single brain power of an individual. In a group of individuals there is more likelihood that an individual will be willing to say an idea is bad and needs to be reexamined.

•Increased motivation of members. Most managers are not trained, rewarded, or reinforced for making the workplace a sociologically and psychologically healthy experience and therefore misunderstand its importance in the forging of a good team. Employees who work in teams typically state they have received more support than they would have in a nonteam environment. In a well-run team the social interaction of team members is a positive and rejuvenating force. In most of the organizations we have worked in or have done scans on, members of successful teams often state that the experience was one of their best, most productive, and most creative.

•Increased knowledge. Teams provide all members with connections that can lead to new opportunities and new work experience that would be less likely to occur in a traditional work environment. People are exposed to other jobs and ideas that will make them more valuable in their own jobs....

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1: Conceptual Overview of Teams
• PART 2: Team Tools and Techniques
• Bibliography
• Index