Teams

Team-based Structure for Cuttingedge Ltd: Considerations, Advantages and Pitfalls

Introduction

Team based structure is relatively a new phenomenon in the field of management. It is a decentralized organizational structure in which powers are distributed among the team members and they are hold responsible for the performance of their team members. Traditionally, we used to have a centralized organizational structure wherein final authority was with the boss or the owner of a business. Centralized nature of traditional organizational structure rendered it impossible to deliver required results in big organizations with over 100 or more employees as boss or the owner of the firm cannot keep an eye on everyone all the time. That's why managers of big organization felt the need to distribute the power and form their organizations on individual units call teams. Research has shown that organizations with team based structure shows better performance than the organizations that are still being managed in a way traditional way. Historically, Team based structure not only has made organizations efficient, but also made their employees feel a valuable part of the organization and provided them freedom to deliver the required results. In a team based structure, employee input in making important decision is the spirit of team structure which helps organization to implement change and innovation easily. This is due to the fact that almost every significant decision with the help of employees which makes employees a part of that decision and make them easily accept and facilitate that decision in its implementation (Steckler & Fondas, 2005, Pp.20).

Team based structure calls for forming teams or work groups that execute the organizational operations. In team based structure, decision making authority which directly affects the employees, or team members, lies in the hands of employees or team members themselves. Work arrangements are not governed by the rigid chain of command unlike traditional structure. We have witnessed many organizations, big or small, benefitting from organizing themselves in a team based structure. For instance, at an e-learning division of NIIT, customers were not getting their orders on time and managers recognized this problem successfully by analyzing the functional structure of their organization. They realized that division's functional structure is slow and need to be made efficient by having a decentralized team based structure. Consequently, managers restructured the division and formed teams that represented specific market segments such as high-tech, higher education, corporate and so on. Managers formed teams based on the special learning need of each segment e-learning division was serving. Team based structure brought real benefits for NIIT because the organization witnessed huge reduction in delivery time as well as content development which directly affected the customer satisfaction in a positive way. This ultimately resulted in significantly improved profits for NIIT (Cohen, 2003, Pp.194).

Literature Review

Empowering employees and giving them freedom to deliver the results has proved to be an effective method in numerous contemporary organizations. For instance, the management team at HPCL launched company-wide change effort aimed at team working and employee empowerment for improving employee involvement, employee ...