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 in which SMTs differ from traditional work groups, the outcomes of SMTs, challenges for future research on SMTs, and limitations of SMTs.

To understand the difference between traditional work teams and SMTs, consider the example of a manufacturing facility that produced blades for jet engines. The plant was organized into SMTs. Each SMT decided who could join the group, what jobs people would work on, and how the jobs were to be done. In addition, each SMT disciplined members of the group and evaluated members' competencies in order to determine compensation. In an SMT operation, activities such as maintenance and quality control are part of the group's responsibilities rather than independent support operations. The fundamental idea is that the responsibility and authority for all the major work decisions are held by the team rather than by some organizational hierarchy. However, all SMTs are not the same. The major differences among SMTs concern the scope and number of decisions the group controls. The critical criterion of an SMT is that the majority of work decisions are made by the group.