Self-Managing Teams

Teams are a fundamental part of most manufacturing, service, and high technology companies and most nonprofit organizations. Some teams operate in a face-to-face setting, whereas others are geographically distributed. Some occur within a single organization, whereas others contain members from multiple organizations. Self-managing teams (SMTs) share some features common to traditional work groups, including group goals, a set of interdependent tasks, and the challenge of coordinating tasks and member skills to create a group product or service. What distinguishes SMTs is their control over the decision-making process. In traditional work groups, managers decide who is in the group and how and [Page 738]when members interact with one another. In an SMT, many of these decisions are made by the group. This entry examines the ways ...