Self-Directed Teams Self-Directed Work Teams

Self-Directed Teams

Self-directed work teams are becoming increasingly popular in both manufacturing and service organizations, because of their positive characteristics of focusing on team contributions and solutions, collaboration, continuous improvement, competency and positive results to productivity. However, a company must think carefully about the ramifications on both the management and the personnel when implementing these teams. They will impact everyone in the organization, including both management and employees. It will be necessary to educate people at all levels of the organization about the power of these teams. Especially, the organization must ensure that everyone recognizes that self-directed teams are not a new management fad, but rather an important element since World War II. Competitive standards are changing around the world, and organizations have to do whatever they can to meet and surpass them.

The importance of teams in an organizational setting is relatively new, growing during the late 1950s and 1960s. Although the concept of self-directed teams was established in the 1960s, it was not until the 1980s that they came to the fore. It is not surprising, therefore, that although a number of studies have been conducted on self-directed work teams, a great deal more need to be conducted to better clarify what company and employee factors are required to best guarantee their successful implementation.

The concept of self-managed work teams are a direct outgrowth of socio-technical systems theory and design that was developed by Eric Trist and his colleagues in England about forty years ago. This theory contends that organizations closely unite people and technology in complex forms to produce specific outputs. This process is supported through sub-systems. The technical sub-system, for instance, consists of equipment, technologies and operational methods used to transform raw material into products or services. The social sub-system includes the work structure that causes people to interact with both technologies and each other (Attaran & Nguyen, 1999).

The primary method of instilling the socio-technical systems approach has been cross-sectional design teams, which usually implement planned change programs, initiate improvements, and encourage learning. The concept works only when team members understand their goals and are committed to attaining. Thus, team members are involved in formulating tasks so that they feel invested in the process and dedicated to accomplishing the stated goals (Attaran & Nguyen, 1999).

Before proceeding, it is important to clarify some specific terminology. According to Kalbaugh (1998), a self-directed team consists of two or more people who share decision-making powers and the responsibility for considerable aspects of their individual jobs on the way that their work interacts with that of other team members and for how their team's contributions affect the overall organization. Other names for self-directed teams are empowered teams, autonomous work teams and self-managed teams.

Chatfield, Vice President for Engineering Leadership Interaction Research Institute, makes a distinction on his website between self-directed and self-managed groups: He states that the former is a group of individuals working together in their own way toward a common goal that the team defines. The team also handles compensation and discipline and acts as a profit center by defining its own future. Before anyone would try to implement a self-directed team, he/she should know and be able to articulate expected benefits. A mature self-directed team, when compared to typical hierarchical management, would have demonstrated measured results. Rather, a self-directed managed team is a group of people working together in their own way toward a common goal that is defined outside or external to the team. For the sake of this paper, however, the two terms will be used as synonymously.

Characteristics of self-directed teams include: 1) Formed permanently. Unlike quality circles, members are part of an ongoing, active team; 2) Set goals and methods to achieve them; 3). Meet regularly to plan and report activities, discuss problems and strengthen cohesiveness; 4). Establish rules, roles and procedures. Teams may be empowered and have control over: Determining responsibilities within the team, handling absenteeism and other member problems, allocating vacation time, scheduling; recruiting and hiring new members, selecting their leaders, setting performance standards for themselves, appraising group performance, budgeting, and training 5) Members are interdependent, learn each other's jobs, often rotate duties, and commonly fill in for absent teammates.

As with any other newly introduced organizational structure, self-directed teams vary in their successful output based on a variety of factors. These can be categorized into factors that are organization driven, or the degree of success due to characteristics of the company and its management, and factors that are individual driven, or the degree of success due to the personality and skill level of the team members.

The self-directed work team is usually thought of as a "leaderless" group of workers who take the place of supervisors and fulfill many management functions (Capozzoli, 2004). However, many of the trials to implement self-directed work teams have not succeeded, because the organization has not been prepared for this structure or not provided the necessary support. Some guidelines that can increase the success of self-directed teams include: 1).The organization has a well considered vision of the way these teams will fit into the overall structure of the entire organization; 2) the whole company must be ready to change its culture in support of the teams; 3) the organization must have the resources required to back this form of change in time, money and people.

4) After the training takes place, it will take time for the teams to get used to one another and develop their new-found skills; 5) Performance expectations of the teams must be developed, so they know attainable and not "pie-in-the-sky" expectations; 6) Feedback methods must be developed for teams, so they can determine what they are doing and make necessary corrections; 7) Flexible boundaries must be set so teams will be allowed to operate and know limits of empowerment; and 8. Self-directed teams must never be thought of as needing management intervention. Supervisors will not be completely replaced, but will develop a new roll as team coaches and advisors (Capozzoli, 2004).

Tata and Prasad (2004) found that despite the popularity of self-directed teams not all attempts to implement them are productive. As a result, the authors' study examined the relationships between structural variables, level of team self-management, and judgments of team effectiveness. Their results indicated that the two aspects of organizational structure -- micro-level centralization and formalization -- moderated the influence of the teams' effectiveness. Self-management was more apt to influence judgments on team effectiveness under low levels of micro-level centralization and similar levels of formalization.

The authors (Tata and Prasad, 2004) believed that their findings suggested that teams with the opposite, or high levels of self-management, may have more of an effect in those organizations where the authority to make decisions about task performance is distributed, as well as in companies with less explicit rules, policies, and procedures. As a result, rather than looking inward at team processes or at characteristics of team members to determine why some groups with high levels of self-management are ineffective, firms may need to look at the organizational context of teams, especially at possible misalignments between team-level and organization-level structural factors.

Douglas (2006) found that although implementing self-directed work teams presents a challenge, the subordinates' perceptions of managers' influence strategies impact their success of change within organizations. Relying on data gathered over a year and a-half, Douglas researched employees' perceptions of managerial communication that was used prior to and during the implementation of self-directed teams at a manufacturing firm. His study also examined the effect of team and organizational communication on the members' involvement. The results demonstrated that employees were more motivated by those managers who communicated persuasively using "soft" influence tactics in the team development process. In addition, team communication was found to have a significant positive effect on the members' participation. Thus, it appeared that strong support for use of soft influence tactics in managerial communications when implementing self-directed work teams is effective.

Other changes also must also occur in the management of such organizations with these teams, according to Politis (2003). Self-directed teams were the most memorable trend of the 1990s, and they will continue to dominate the work environment of the twenty-first century (Manz and Sims, 2001) in manufacturing and service organizations (Cohen et al., 1996). As teamwork continues to grow in popularity (Cohen et al., 1996; Manz and Sims, 2001), trust has increasingly taken place within the team context. That is why proponents of self-managing teams suggest that there is a clear need for trust to be established prior to team members responding openly and incorporating new information, or what today is called knowledge. This is the only way they can develop useful decisions.

Politis' (2003) results suggested that the interpersonal trust dimension of reliance in fellow workers is a main property that can impact communication/problem comprehension and self-managing teams structure. It is the "trustworthy" intention of peers that encourages and facilitates an open communication, the understanding of work-related issues, and organizing the dissemination of knowledge. Such a "trustworthy" intention among co-workers is the chief ingredient for knowledge acquisition and knowledge sharing required for a self-directed force.

Moreover, the strong correlation between confidence in peers and communication/problem understanding demonstrated that it is the confidence and ability of these co-workers that encourage members of self-managing teams to gather new information and knowledge, so that they may create useful decisions in relation to problem solving. Confidence in peers resulted in a negative, not positive, impact on organization and negotiation. This suggested that confidence in peers has a negative effect in the process of organizing the dissemination of knowledge in self-managing teams. Thus, it is imperative for team members to trust their peers and management and, in doing so, create and share new knowledge and further the organization's opportunity to offer best solutions to clients. Present research lacks the empirical evidence supporting the relationship between interpersonal trust and knowledge acquisition. Especially, academicians and practitioners are interested in studying whether "interpersonal trust" advances the follower's knowledge acquisition practices -- knowledge sharing and what the consequences are for performance in a self-managing environment. More studies need to be conducted on this in the future (Politis, 2003).

It is thus increasingly being realized that making the shift from a traditional hierarchical organization into a team structure is not simple and cut and dry. Proper planning, preparation and education are required to make empowered, self-directed work teams successful. Simkovits provides the case of a small, 75 employee low-tech manufacturer in New England, hypothetically called MANUFAC, which illustrates some of the challenges when self-managed work teams are developed without the perquisite pre-work, including the consideration of all the implications for everyone involved. The plant manager at MANUFAC, who had spent both a year learning about the concept of teams and several months working to get the organization's owners and production employees interested in this concept, led the effort. Over the course of several months, and with the best of intentions, MANUFAC switched from traditional production departments into separate product-oriented teams. Each one was made responsible for production functions for different product categories.

A year after team implementation, plant performance that was based on objective measures of productivity, efficiency and quality had somewhat improved. However, MANUFAC's plant was concerned by disagreements within and between the teams and the plant manager. There was very little inter-team communication and collaboration, which was essential for continued team learning. In addition, the original production supervisors, who were now team members, did little to assist other teams to accomplish their work.

The reason why these teams experienced problems lies in the lack of company preparation for self-directed teams. The plant manager of MANUFAC had done a good job in providing a great deal of information to the teams and positively encouraging them to learn from their mistakes. However, conflicts arose since the members of the teams did not yet have the capacity to sufficiently manage themselves. Being used to having others make their decisions for them, the teams were not proficient in either making their own group decisions or in resolving new production problems that were raised. Further, the supervisors were not trained as coaches, so they could help the teams through their difficulties. Frequently, they just stood by as the teams floundered. Trust also became an issue, because not all team members or management believed that self-directed teams could work. Some team members, and even the supervisors, actually undermined the team's work with the hope that the company's owners would revert to the previous hierarchical structure (Simkovits).

Simkovits concluded that five requirements need to be addressed while implementing self-directed teams: 1) Employees need to be made clear of the organization's mission and vision, and be able to identify their work in the context of that mission and vision; 2) teams must be adequately structured and staffed so that appropriate individuals are sharing the relevant work processes; 3) employees must be made clear of their unit's performance goals and objectives that become the basis for their daily work; 4) a system must exist for measuring and communicating team and whole unit performance so teams are able to keep track of and learn from past results and work to improve those results; and 5) the organization has to implement an appropriate team appraisal and reward system to evaluate and reinforce team performance.

However, it is not only the organizational structure and the way that these teams are implemented that lead to their success or failure. As with any new approach, some individuals will adapt more quickly and have more of the inclination and necessary personal skills required. Since self-directed teams are so very different from hierarchal work settings, the people who become team members require a new mindset. Regardless of how much training some people have or the support of the organization, it is easier for some individuals to change over to this new approach than others. It is also crucial the way that the individual team members work together.

According to Duimering and Robinson (2007), "relatively little is known about the group norms characterizing how the members of effective teams behave and interact with one another while doing their work." Having a better understanding of team behavior and norms necessitates paying close attention to the situational and work-related aspects of self-directed teams, but most research of team effectiveness has relied on cross-sectional survey methodology that delineate behavior in general terms but do not recognize the unique aspects of team task situations that impact member behavior.

The authors' (Duimering & Robinson, 2007) study examined the behavioral norms of an effective self-directed team in terms of its immediate organizational task situation. They closely investigated internal and external patterns of team member interrelations and behavior to determine how members visualize team performance to find those aspects of the task situation that could have affected team member behavior. This study focused on team results in the final assembly area, because factory supervisors and personnel described it as the factory's most efficient self-directed team. Positive team behaviors far exceeded negative ones. Further, the team demonstrated high autonomy, positive affect among members, team member identification, and cohesiveness -- all normally associated with team effectiveness.

Of greater interest, the study by Duimering and Robinson (2007) showed that helping among team members was an especially significant behavior that was regularly noticed. Although many other teams display behaviors such as autonomy, cohesiveness, strong member identification and positive affect among members, not all of them also demonstrate high task-related norms that encourage behavior that is in line with the organization's performance goals. It was concluded, therefore, that it was its strong, positive, task-related meta-norm of helping each other whenever needed that was the most essential behavioral attribute that clearly characterized the final assembly team's effectiveness.

A study by Frye, Bennett, and Caldwell (2006) researched the collective emotional intelligence (EI) of teams in regard to the their interpersonal process, a thoroughly accepted measure of team performance (Brannick and Prince 1997). EI is the capacity to reason about emotions to improve the thinking process. It consists of the abilities to correctly understand others' emotions, access and engender emotions to aid thought, accept emotional knowledge, and contemplatively control emotions to further emotional and intellectual capacity. More specifically in a sample of work teams, Frye, Bennett and Caldwell examined the connection between team averaged EI and two aspects of the team interpersonal process: team task orientation, or the focus on performance of the task, and team maintenance functions, or the focus on maintaining amiable group relations.

Brannick and Prince (1997) highlighted the importance of process measures of teamwork by noting."..team process measures may give us a truer picture of team function than do outcome measures...the interpersonal part of [team] process can be thought of as providing the grease that keeps the parts of the team working together smoothly." The Frye, Bennett, and Caldwell (2006) study focused on the two dimensions of EI, interpersonal and general mood, that capture the interpersonal dynamics and interactions taking place among self-directed team members. In the study, specific attention was paid to the quality of team interpersonal processes in addition to how the members set similar goals, handed out tasks, and functioned collaboratively toward achieving team goals. The research was motivated by two questions: Does the aggregated EI represented by team averaged EI predict team task orientation and team maintenance functions? Are specific composite scales of EI better predictors of team task orientation and team maintenance functions than others?

The authors (Frye, Bennett, and Caldwell, 2006) expected overall team averaged EI to be positively and significantly associated with team task orientation and team maintenance functions. In addition, they believed team averaged interpersonal EI and team averaged general mood EI would have stronger relationships with team task orientation and maintenance functions than overall team averaged EI, because the emphasis of items included in these two EI composite scales were specifically developed in order to measure the various aspects of personal interrelationships between team members.

The research findings provided support that EI assessed with a multidimensional process-oriented measure indicated positive and significant relationships to team process. Results suggested that team averaged interpersonal EI may be helpful to predict the "team task function" aspect of a self-directed team process. Further, it appeared that teams with members who on average have EI behaviors, such as reliability, responsibility, high social skills, and positive life outlook, may be a more effective in interpersonal processes for "team task orientation" than teams with lower EI scores.

A study by Kauffield (2006) examined the affect of self-directed group work on team competence. The sample was made up of 83 production groups from 20 medium-sized enterprises: 44 self-directed work groups and 39 traditional work groups. Results, based on process-analytic behavioral data, showed that self-directed teams are more competent than traditional work groups on seven out of 12 aspects of competence. The self-directed work groups are seen better than traditional teams at describing problems in a differentiated manner. More than al, is the excellence of self-directed teams at linking problems, such as looking for causes or identifying problem results, and at connecting solutions, such as identifying pros and cons of solutions and installing them into the problem's entirety. Further, the self-directed work group's superiority is demonstrated in the positive and negative aspect of methodological competence. These groups are structured better and are not as apt to forget details and examples as traditional work groups. Participation is the most important predictor of team-based professional, methodological, social and self-competence in self-directed teams. The superiority of these teams is also shown in the negative aspect of self-competence, since they make fewer negative remarks than traditional work groups about participation, for example, groaning or denying optimization opportunities.

However, they do not differ entirely from traditional work groups. For the positive aspect of self-competence no significant differences between self-directed and traditional work groups occur. Also, just one of the three positive criteria indicates a significant difference: In planning measures to realize solutions, self-directed work groups perform better than their peers. No significant differences exist between self-directed and traditional groups in regards to social competence. Both groups make similar numbers of positive or negative judgments about persons or their activities in conversations. Self-directed teams show more competence in methodology and some in professional and self-competence, but no better social competence when completing optimization tasks.

A de Jong, de Ruyter and Wetzels (2006) looked at this self-directed team in another setting -- "the service delivery process area. They studied the makeup of these groups, which they called self-managing teams, since they saw an increasing number of companies have begun to organize their service delivery process around these teams. This suggested the authors' necessity of developing confidence beliefs about a team's collective competence. Consistent with recent theories about the empowerment of customer service workers, they hypothesized that when the principle of self-management is successfully implemented in a work situation, team members will rely strongly on cognitions concerning their collective service competence. The research analyzed causality in the connection between employee confidence beliefs and performance for boundary-spanning delivering financial services. The authors made a distinction between employee confidence related to task-specific, or team efficacy, and generalized, or group potency. They also distinguished between customer-based, or customer-perceived service quality, and financial, or service revenues, performance. They analyzed employee and customer survey data in addition to the financial performance data from 51 teams throughout the organization.

They (de Jong, de Ruyter and Wetzels, 2006) found divergent results for team efficacy and group potency, which may indicate that team efficacy has reciprocal, causal relationships with service revenues and customer-perceived service quality. To the contrary, they found group potency has no causal relationship with service revenues. Customer-perceived service quality predicts group potency, but there is no evidence that the reverse is correct. The study also showed that instead of general competence, task-specific employee beliefs are important predictors of performance in the complex service delivery environment. In other words, managers need to prioritize task-specific competence in order to deliver service delivery excellence and design training programs accordingly.

The above studies regarding the personal traits and competence of self-directed teams and their members, show the complexity of these groups and their makeup. Because one is dealing with the variability of human personality, behavior and skills, forming and implementing successful self-directed teams is not an easy process. In addition, these studies, many which have only been conducted in the last few years, open new questions. For example, Kauffield (2006), who is noted above for conducting a competence study, concludes that results from such research alters the perspectives and directions of managers as well as calls for additional studies to be performed.