Work Team Effectiveness

Fundamentals

The application of work teams is centuries old. However, the documentation of their application in book chapters and research articles often begins with the Hawthorne studies conducted in the 1920s and 1930s, which included a series of empirical investigations of factors related to group outcomes. During this time period, however, the vast majority of organizational work was still performed by individual employees. The exceptions were primarily from military and manufacturing environments (i.e., cockpit and tank crews and informal automobile assembly teams). After the Hawthorne studies, the majority of interest in work teams was expressed by researchers rather than managers. In other words, the rate of research increased, whereas the application of work teams did not. Much of the early research involving work teams was performed by psychologists. Industrial/organizational psychologists followed their colleagues in social psychology by studying teams in organizational settings as opposed to the laboratory. While there was a significant amount of research being conducted through the 1950s, the application of teams did not become popular until the 1980s.

The increased interest from organizations for implementing work teams can be linked to the advent [Page 932]of total quality management (TQM). Organizations such as Ford Motor Company, Lockheed-Martin, and Motorola began experimenting with multiple types of teams. First, quality circles were attempted, and then some companies started performing production, project, and service work with teams. Many organizations realized the benefits of team-based approaches by achieving increases in productivity, efficiency, and quality. For other organizations that failed to implement appropriate support mechanisms, the benefit of teams fell far short of their promise. This, however, did not deter a number of companies from experimenting with team-based structures. The implementation of teams to perform a variety of tasks became commonplace in the 1990s. Kodak (customer service teams), Chevron (interfunctional teams), Dow Corning (self-managed teams within a unionized context), Motorola (self-managed teams within a nonunionized context), and Miller Brewing Company (cross-functional teams) are just a few examples of the application of teams within organizations. Today, the pursuit of effective teams is ubiquitous across continents, industries, and organizations.

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