Self-managed Work Teams Research Articles

Participatory Ergonomics: Current Approaches to Improving Organizational Effectiveness and Quality of Work Life

Participatory ergonomics is an idea whose time has come! There are many approaches which have been utilized by organizations to improve productivity and enhance quality of work life. Participation itself is not a new idea, but because of current organizational and environmental forces for change, new organizational philosophies are emerging which are developed, designed, and operated with participation of the employees concerned and which do result in improved organizational effectiveness and quality of work life. Organizations in the turbulent environments of today must be able to quickly adapt to conditions of change. Many major forces for change have emerged which significantly impact managerial philosophies and behaviors. In this decade, in fact, the rules of business have changed drastically and permanently. Market conditions, foreign competition, and high growth markets are major forces in today's environment along with societal values, composition of the labor force, type of product, and the general business environment itself. An effective approach to management would suggest that it address these forces for change in order to adapt and succeed. No single approach utilizing participatory techniques is universally effective: a contingency approach is advocated. Basic assumptions underlying a contingency model include the notion that no single approach will be effective under all circumstances, and that most approaches utilized today will be effective under a certain set of conditions. It appears that some form of participative management meets current needs primarily because it best suits the labor force, today's technologies, and current societal conditions. The major participative management approaches discussed include quality circles (currently the most popular), job enrichment strategies, cooperative union-management quality of work life programs, gainsharing plans, and the development and operation of self-managing work teams. Also discussed is an emerging innovation in participative management, use of the parallel organization. There are other methods available, to be sure, but these appear to be the principal participative approaches of today. Most participatory approaches and techniques are not new. What is new and very important is the commitment on the part of the organization to adopt what may become organization-wide change strategies through the use of participatory management strategies. The ultimate goal, of course, is to achieve improved organizational effectiveness, product quality, and enhanced quality of work life.

Leading Workers to Lead Themselves: The External Leadership of Self- Managing Work Teams

We gratefully acknowledge the encouragement and support of Dr. Richard Cherry. This paper explores the paradoxical role of the external leaders of self-managing workteams. Observation, interviews, group elicitations, and a literature search were used to identify salient leader behaviors in a medium-sized manufacturing plant that had been operating for several years under a system of self-managing work teams. A selfmanagement leadership questionnaire was developed to measure the 21 leader behaviors identified. Correlations with overall leadership-effectiveness ratings generally indicated that the external leaders' most important behaviors are those that facilitate the team's self-management through self-observation, self-evaluation, and selfreinforcement. The study suggests that there is a legitimate role for external leaders of self-managing work teams but that it differs from traditional and participative leadership roles.

A Participative Design for Dispersed Employees in Turbulent Environments

Approaches to sociotechnical redesign of work organization have concentrated on developing self-managing teams, using direct task interdependences as the basis for redesign. However, situations exist where it is extremely difficult to redesign work organization in this way. They arise when individuals are linked only indirectly through their separate contributions to organizational performance. Hence, in order to increase organizational effectiveness and employee satisfaction in turbulent environments, new designs for participation and collaboration must be found which do not depend on creating self-managing work teams. The experience reported here suggests that the "core management group" concept is an effective mechanism not only for employee participation in management decision-making, but also for increasing their ability to respond to change and uncertainly affecting their immediate work situations.