Organisational Roadmap Towards Teal Organisations

Tanya Bondarouk, Anna Bos-Nehles, Maarten Renkema, Jeroen Meijerink, Jan de Leede

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787563131
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This volume explores and presents challenges that "traditional" organisations experience once they take off towards self-managing organisations (or Teal Organisations). The concept of Teal Organisations is not surprising nowadays, but strangely enough it remains a dream concept: the majority of modern organisations represent hierarchical managerial constructions, with little to no evidence of self-management.
The main characteristics of self-management are well-known: whole tasks; organisational actors equipped with a certain skill portfolio that is required to accomplish these tasks; work organised in teams that have autonomy for decision-making and performance management. Self-management is often accompanied by greater flexibility, better use of employees' creative capacities, increased quality of work life, and decreased employee absenteeism and turnover, eventually resulting in increased job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
In this volume, we suggest that self-managing teams require a new way forward in modern organisations. Particularly, we offer a new roadmap for leaders who are responsible for the implementation of self-managing teams.

The Concept of Self-Managing Teams: History and Taxonomy

A Short History of Self-Managing Teams in Three Waves

To improve our understanding of the potential of self-managing teams (SMTs), we have to look into the past. Teams are certainly not a new phenomenon, nor are SMTs. They have been around in the organisational world for decades. Around 100 years ago, the team as an organisational unit appeared. Stemming from the Hawthorne studies back in the 1920s and 1930s, conducted at the Western Electric Company, reported by Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939), the group was ‘discovered’. It is not only the individual who counts, it is the individual and his or her relations with co-workers. The group – informal or formal – is important in understanding how to improve the work situation of people. What we do know about teams and SMTs, their antecedents and outcomes will be discussed later in a thorough literature review of SMTs. Here we intend to summarise in a structured way the development of the nature and the context of SMTs in a short history of SMT research.

Three waves are described here using two main lines of team characteristics: the organisational design and the socio-psychological team processes. The history of SMTs can be read as an interplay between both aspects. The psychology discipline contributed to a better understanding of group processes, team dynamics and power and trust relations within teams and between teams and their environment. The sociologists, management and job design theorists contributed to a better understanding of the structural aspects of teams, the connections between teams and the environment and the embedment of teams within organisations. From time to time, in every wave, attempts have been made to integrate both aspects in ‘grand theories’, such as classic socio-technical systems (STS) thinking (Cherns, 1976; Trist & Bamforth, 1951) in the first wave, modern STS theory (De Sitter, Den Hertog, & Dankbaar, 1997) and empowered teams (Wellins, Byham, & Wilson, 1991) in the second wave and the evolutionary approach (Laloux, 2014) in the third wave.

First Wave: The Classic Self-managing Team Approach (1950–1980)

The foundation of the classic SMT approach was the discovery of the power of group relations deep down in the British coal mines. Detailed observation of traditional and new methods of coal mining led to the statement that the social fabric of group relations are vital and cannot be understood without the technology (Trist & Bamforth, 1951). To understand productivity, it is better to think about the joint optimisation of technology and social systems. The new coal mining methods were destroying the previously self-regulating small groups of the traditional hand-got method. Instead, the more industrial longwall method was introduced with a functional structure and led to a kind of alienation of the team members: if supervisors want to do it in this way, we will do it, although it is better to change our behaviour. This was not determined by technology, and other social arrangements are also possible (the concept of organisational choice) and can dramatically increase output and productivity. It required multi-skilled workers, with problem-solving authorities on the shopfloor and good social relations between co-workers and supervisors. The core ideas of SMTs were born: common goals, interdependence, self-regulating capacities, trust relations and multi-skilled workers.

Throughout the history of research into teams, we see two models as vitally important and laying the path for future studies into SMTs. The first stream of research was developed by Hackman and his school. Hackman and Oldham (1976) designed the job characteristics model of work motivation, in which they propose core job dimensions, critical psychological states and related personal work outcomes, such as high internal motivation of the proposed work, high-quality work performance, high work satisfaction, low employee turnover and low absenteeism. Almost a decade later, Hackman (1987) used the concepts of the work design theory and job characteristics model in the normative model of group effectiveness. This model looked at how group effectiveness is established by starting with the organisational context and the group design; it considers the influence of group synergy and looks at the process criteria of effectiveness. The model was designed to support and assess work teams. Hackman (1987) and Hackman and Oldham (1976) designed frameworks on team effectiveness and job motivation, which are widely mentioned in later research on team effectiveness and also with regard to SMTs (Cohen, Ledford, & Spreitzer, 1996).

Second Wave: The Modern Self-managing Team Approach (1980–2005)

The second influential stream of research was developed from the work of Cohen et al. (1996), who designed a predictive model for effective SMTs. We view this model as representing the modern SMT approach. This model makes an important contribution to the literature since it is one of the few models especially designed for SMTs. Cohen published 57 works that earned more than 9,500 citations. Her work is well known, especially her article on ‘a predictive model for effective self-managing teams’.

Cohen et al. (1996) describe four main predictors for effective SMTs: group task design, group characteristics, encouraging supervisory behaviour and a context that supports employee involvement. These predictors explain different variances in the following dependent variables: manager ratings of performance, team ratings of performance, quality of work life (QWL) and withdrawal behaviours. Since these four antecedents and their outcomes function as the foundation of this literature review, we first provide a more detailed explanation of them. From the literature, we sensed that successful teams possess the following characteristics: they satisfy external and internal clients, develop capabilities for future performance and their members find meaning and satisfaction within their team (e.g. Hackman, 2002). Five conditions to enhance success for teams are described in the ‘Five Factor Model’ by Hackman (2002): being an actual team, providing direction with clear goals, enabling the structure of the team, having a supportive context in place and expert guidance or coaching.

Work design and STS theory point out that task design contributes to effective SMTs by its effect on motivation and its impact on self-regulation. There are several attributes of task design that advocate for work team motivation and self-regulation: group task variety, group task identity, group task significance, group task autonomy and group task feedback (Cohen et al., 1996). Group task design is also found to predict team ratings of performance but does not influence QWL.

Encouraging supervisory behaviour is the attribute focused on self-leadership in SMTs. This self-leadership is established through a supervisor facilitating it. There are six leadership behaviours this supervisor should adhere to: encourage self-observation/self-evaluation, self-goal setting, self-reinforcement, self-criticism, self-expectation and rehearsal. This self-leadership is found to influence the performance effectiveness of team members since they learn to improve team performance by correctly performing desired behaviours. Self-leadership, just like group task design, has self-regulation as the key to self-management (Cohen et al., 1996). Encouraging supervisory behaviour is found to be negatively related to manager ratings of performance.

Group characteristics as an antecedent is divided into the sub-categories of group composition, group beliefs and group processes. Group composition consists of the variables group expertise, group size adequacy and group stability. Group beliefs, which a group shares with its members, can be classified into group norms and group self-efficacy. The sub-category group process refers to the interaction between group members when on the job. Group process is divided into group coordination and group innovation processes. Part of the effectiveness of a SMT may depend upon the ability of the team to solve problems and implement innovative ideas to address the change in task demands (Cohen et al., 1996). Group characteristics were found to predict absenteeism and team ratings of performance but is not related to QWL.

The last category mentioned by Cohen et al. (1996) is the employee involvement context. An organisational context that supports the involvement of employees results in more effective SMTs. For SMTs to be effective, several elements of organisational design should be moved to lower levels in an organisation. Cohen et al. (1996) mention five design elements: power, information, rewards, training and resources. The further these five elements are moved down the organisation, the more employees will take ownership and responsibility for their task, which in turn motivates performance. The five elements reinforce each other. Employee involvement context has the strongest influence on QWL and manager ratings of performance, and only employee involvement can predict QWL.

In line with the model of Cohen et al. (1996), many other authors and researchers came up with their conceptualisation of SMTs. In some cases, they rely more on the cultural and socio-psychological aspects of teamwork, such as Katzenbach and Smith (1993) and Wellins et al. (1991). In other cases, they rely more on the structural and design aspects of teamwork, like modern STS theory (De Sitter et al., 1997). In this short history of SMTs, we must pay some attention to the details of the modern STS approach.

van Eijnatten (1993) has identified four different streams of modern STS, which are geographically distinct: the Australian, the North American, the Scandinavian and the Dutch approach. The Australian variant, also called participative design, is an approach with a full emphasis on the participation of all stakeholders, breaking away from the traditional expert approach. Tools in this approach are the search conference, the participative design workshop and some skill-analysis techniques (Emery, 1993). The North American variant, known as modern STS design, is very much related to the QWL programmes. In the 1990s, many projects were carried out under team labels: empowerment, self-directed teams, high-commitment teams, high-performance teams and so on. Taylor and Felten (1993) provide an overview of the STS-thinking in North America. They stress among other things the understanding of the business in which a company is involved and the focus on the product of the STS approach. In the variance control analysis, they emphasise that when key variances occur, they should be controlled by the group of employees where they arise. They also indicate the need for competence development of workers to control these key variances and to understand the company’s environment. The examples they provide are typical mainstream STS implementations, very successful in increasing the internal control of the teams, but less successful in increasing the control of the teams over business responsibilities. The Scandinavian variant of STS – democratic dialogue – goes beyond the company level, emphasising the formation of networks and open communication between the partners. Local knowledge should be developed in sharing information from other companies. Adler and Docherty (1998) claim that many studies focus on primary work group control, including the development of business control and customer contact for these work group members.

The Dutch variant of modern STS offers a detailed design approach, claiming an integral approach to the quality of the organisation, QWL and quality of labour relations through the design of the architecture of the organisation structure. De Sitter et al. (1997, p. 503) recognise that the open systems approach is much more than only QWL and therefore ‘functional requirements with respect to customers, the physical environment, the labour market, suppliers of capital, workers, etc. should be regarded as equivalent’. The concepts developed within the Dutch variant include the distinction between the production structure, the control structure and the information structure, as well as the logic of designing them in this sequence. The aim is to reduce the complexity of the organisation and to create primary work groups that are responsible for the whole product flow, from the beginning to the end. Detailed design principles regarding the parallelisation and segmentation of product flows are given. This provides the SMTs with a structural basis for having control over purpose, context and system dynamics. The concept of control capacity (De Sitter, 1994) of primary work groups seems to be quite comprehensive; it is possible to analyse and design a detailed picture of all relevant internal and external decisions and routine and non-routine ones.

Firmly based in modern STS, but one step further is the mini-company concept (De Leede, Looise, & Verkerk, 2002). It was Suzaki (1993) who coined the term ‘mini-company’ for primary work groups that are responsible for their supplier–client relationships. The organisation is viewed as a collection of mini-companies. Each work group within the organisation has its own process. The next process is viewed as the customer, and the previous process is viewed as the supplier of every unit. The word ‘mini-company’ brings ideas such as ownership, entrepreneurship and client–supplier relationships. The mini-company has four characteristics, distinct from socio-technical primary work groups (De Leede et al., 2002; p. 345): (1) The mini-company has a name and a mission statement. Both are formulated by the mini-company itself. This relates to control over purpose. (2) The mini-company identifies its clients and suppliers and is responsible for managing its relationships. While it is not always appropriate for external clients and suppliers to have direct contacts with the mini-company, there are at least the internal client–supplier relationships. This is equivalent to control over context. (3) The mini-company is responsible for its own improvement programme. Based on its contacts with clients, suppliers and management, the mini-company is able to identify its weak points, which are open to improvement. This characteristic entails control over system dynamics. (4) The mini-company presents its name, mission, members, customers, suppliers, improvement programme and results on display walls.

The mini-company process is the dynamic side of the mini-company concept. It represents a cycle in which the name and mission are under review in every period and the relevant clients and suppliers are identified and visited. These visits are oriented towards overall assessments of the mini-company. In executing the cycle of the mini-company process, the requirements of the customers (internal or external) and suppliers are made visible every time. These requirements are the inputs for the improvement programme. The mini-company concept has the three areas of control that are additional to mainstream STS theory, according to Adler and Docherty (1998). This concerns control over purpose in formulating the group’s business goals, control over context in maintaining the client–supplier relationships and control over system dynamics in the learning and improvement aspects.

These socio-technical system ideas about a structural basis for SMTs are used and ‘re-invented’ in other approaches of the 1990s and early 2000s. A good example is the Busin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Prelims
• Introduction
• 1. The Concept of Self-managing Teams: History and Taxonomy
• 2. Literature Review of Successful Self-managing Teams
• 3. Healthcare Teams in Long-term and Elderly Care at Livio: A Case Study
• 4. The Relevance of Line Managers in Self-managing Teams
• 5. Governance Mechanisms and HRM Activities in Self-managing Teams
• 6. The Role of Organisational Support and HRM Function in Self-managing Teams
• 7. Discussion and Future Outlook
• Appendices
• Index