A631.4.4.RB_FogartyShawn

There has been a growing trend for companies to operate in a flatter, more horizontal profile in self-managed teams. This design offers several major benefits such as autonomous groups working independently while collectively achieving the organizations goals. There is an opportunity for Increased performance leading to incentives and rewards based on the team and individual performance. There is an increase in responsibilities shared by the team and team member often retain a higher job satisfaction from task identity and task significance (Brown, 2011, p. 349-352).

There are also several drawbacks of self-managed teams whereas individual privacy and independence is lost as information of all type is openly shared amongst the group. Individual are in constant interaction with team members and team have a high demand to cross train and understand multi-faceted position. Also, research has not conclusive found that self-managed teams work in long-run operations (Brown, 2011, p. 350-352).

I have but do not prefer to work within self-managed teams. I would much rather work within a high-performance team that tailored to a specified time window or specific task or objective. While I admire the benefits of offered by self-managed teams I would go nuts never being able to get away from my team. I find the climate of high-performance teams much more suiting to my preferred style of work and group interaction. I also prefer a clearly defined structure and the self managed teams are much more fluid than traditional structures.

Leaders would need to develop several competencies in order be an effective external manager of a self-managed work team. As highlighted by the interview between Tesluk and Smith (2008) the primary goal of an external manager is to help develop team capabilities within the team to understand their unique strengths, roles, and responsibilities” (Tesluk & Smith, 2008). Once those elements are outlined, effective external managers need to be hands off. They should not try to solve or fix team problems but allow the team to fix them. External team managers are often challenged to be apart of the process but are confronted as they may start to micro-manage the team (Tesluk & Smith, 2008). Leaders need to be visionary, draw the outline, but let the team shade in the gaps with internal goals and processes. Leaders must allow team enough rope to hang themselves with and the flexibility to reach the desired end state as outlined in the vision. Sometime leaders must also allow teams to drift outside the lines in order to grow.

References

Brown, D. R. (2011). Work Team Development. In An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed., pp. 341-354). Boston, MA: Prentice Hall.

Tesluk, P., & Smith, R. H. (2008, September 22). Self-managing teams: debunking the leadership paradox [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBnR00qgGgM&feature=youtu.be