ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

organizational structure

organizational structure

For this paper, I have selected the first question related to organizational structure.

Question

In what ways can management practices contribute to successful work groups or teams? Illustrate your key arguments with organizationally based examples.

Discussion

For an increasing number of jobs, the future belongs to teams. Due to the complexity of tasks, the need to integrate multiple perspectives and disciplines into work products and services, and/or the sheer volume of work, more people than ever will find themselves working in teams (West, 2003). For the many who have not been well trained for collaborative effort, the thought of this future can be unsettling. The United States, in particular, is a highly individualistic society where the traditional value of independence in thought and action may clash with the reality of a future of work in interdependent teams (Turner, 2000).

In a team-based organization the primary units consist of work teams, or interdependent collections of individual employees who share responsibility for specified outcomes in the organization. An example of a team-based organization is Florida's Cape Coral Hospital, which organized all of its employees into teams and held them accountable for defined results. Among several kinds of teams at Cape Coral, patient care teams delivered medical services to the hospital's patients, ordered supplies, maintained budgets, and handled patient logistics (Moreland, 2008).

Today many enterprises incorporate team-based organizations, including private sector businesses such as automobile manufacturing, public sector institutions such as schools, and various health care organizations. Team-based organizations proliferated in the 1990s after widely publicized stories of dramatic improvements in performance, cost efficiency, and customer satisfaction (Ilgen, 2006).

Team-based organizations have their roots in the 1950s, when new technology in coal mining and textile mills clashed with traditional forms of organization. Advocates of the “socio-technical systems” approach called for joint optimization of automated equipment and social relationships. They experimented with “semiautonomous work groups” with responsibility for scheduling their work, sharing tasks, assigning individual members to specific tasks, rotating jobs, and other duties formerly delegated only to supervisors. Early trials showed such success that many organizations were experimenting with work groups in the 1960s and 1970s. With the advent of total quality management in the 1980s, team-based organizations had gained widespread acceptance (Cohen, 2007).

The hallmark of a team-based organization is a relatively flat structure, with few hierarchical levels and delegation of authority to employees who compose teams at the front line. Teams have responsibility for tasks once considered the exclusive province of supervisors, especially scheduling work, budgeting, cross-training, individual work assignments, conducting maintenance, quality checks, and evaluating members' performance. The key feature of work teams is interdependence among individual members for a coordinated output (Beyerlein, 2000).

Each of the types of teams described above may be short- or long-term in duration, comprising all or part of a person's work program. Although each type of team may require different skills for successful performance, two general sets of competencies are important for team members. First, they need competency in their own area(s) of responsibility, whatever that may be, as do others ...