Macro change drivers like global competition, information and technology innovations, and demographic shifts have required organizations to rethink their structures and processes. In particular, the flattening and downsizing of organizations has led to the empowerment of teams in an attempt to increase flexibility, adaptability, customer responsiveness, and productiveness. The formation of teams requires the presence of certain external and internal conditions. The external requisites include support and direction, such as congruence with strategy, top management support, clear goals and parameters, and effective selection of employees. The internal requisites include an emphasis on preparation and training of employees through initial team building and ongoing team development, and encouragement of a continual reflective learning cycle. Without the internal processes for team learning, even an initially successful team may defeat itself and become unproductive, thereby discouraging further support for team empowerment initiatives.
The classical hierarchical work structures that functioned efficiently during the 1960s and 1970s ceased being competitive during the 1980s and 1990s. Global competition, growing information availability, technological innovations, and shifts in the demographic make-up of the workforce has brought "permanent white water" (Vaill, 1989) to the marketplace. These changes have led most organizations to rethink their fundamental structures and processes. The resultant reengineering, downsizing, delayering, networking, teaming, and empowerment strategies have found mixed results as organizations struggle with transforming themselves into systems that are more flexible, informed, responsive, and adaptive (Drucker, 1995; Mintzberg, 1993; Strebel, 1996).
A means of coping with this turbulence for many organizations is the implementation of self-directed teams in which employees are given more responsibility over their work. Team empowerment is a function of having the authority, resources, information, and accountability to carry out a job (Fisher, 1993). It also refers to the ability of teams to monitor and modify their own processes and procedures. The concept of empowered teams has grown, with the percentage of organizations using self-directed teams having increased from 26% to 35%, and penetration of teams in the organization from 10% of employees to 35% from 1990 to 1992 (Wellins, Byham, and Wilson, 1991). More recent estimates indicate that half of all major corporations are exploring the use of team-based systems (Osterman, 1994). |
