Teamwork

Various Forms of Teamwork

It was initially through the Hawthorne experiments in the Western Electric plant in the 1920s that management scholars discovered the role of groups in organizational performance. Later, while the resulting human relations school of management introduced the group as an organizational reality, it was through the sociotechnical approach of the Tavistock Institute in the [Page 859]1950s that the idea of the team was put forward. Research showed that the work group is a social system that can have a major impact on the performance of firms.

During the 1970s, the successful experiments with semiautonomous teams in the Nordic countries showed that teamwork was a viable solution to a number of organizational problems, particularly those related to the decrease in productivity gains. They also showed that teamwork could be an antidote to the lack of motivation at work, which itself may contribute to low productivity.

In the late 1970s, interest in teams became identified with the quality of work life movement, which favored the transformation of the workplace through labor-management cooperation and the creation of semiautonomous groups of production workers.

In the mid-1980s, the Japanese system became the main reference point in the implementation of teamwork. This was the main impetus for the resurgence of interest in teamwork. Global competition and the opening of borders pushed firms to move toward strategies that focus on product quality, innovation, and diversity. However, the adoption of these strategies requires degrees of flexibility, rapidity, and efficiency on the part of employees, which are hard to achieve without using relatively autonomous multiskilled teams.

Members of the Los Angeles County Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) team save a Haitian woman in a collapsed building after an earthquake in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti, January 17, 2010. This interdisciplinary, highly trained team is one of only two national USARs that deploy internationally. Unlike the fragmentation of tasks found in Taylorism, this kind of teamwork requires a great deal of ingenuity and synergy. Team physicians are chosen for their ability to work collaboratively, as there is no doctor hierarchy.

According to Jean-Pierre Durand and colleagues (1999), there are three main models of work organization that are based on groups. The first is the Fordist model, which is based on a top-down relationship between the supervisor and a group made up of individuals who do not necessarily have relationships with each other. In this context, which is largely governed by an authority system, members are given few responsibilities. In the Japanese system, the second model, supervision of the team is less authoritarian and participation mainly focuses on technical questions that are dealt with in depth in the much-vaunted [Page 860]quality circles. The third model, which is half-way between the Japanese model and the model of semiautonomous teams, comprises teams created for economic reasons. This model is oriented toward the quality of work life and gives the group a degree of freedom to organize its work. In this context, the supervisor's mission is to help the group operate. However, each firm is embedded in a given context, and teamwork may consist of a combination of aspects and nuances from each of the models suggested. Each organization and production system therefore uses teamwork according to a particular configuration, which may include variable degrees of autonomy, interdependency between members, responsibility, and supervision.

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