Remember rotary dial telephones? You won't find any
around business offices today. They're obsolete. Would
you believe executives in many of the largest companies in
the U.S. are making the same conclusions about first-line
supervisors?! In a recent survey of Fortune 1000 companies,
47% reported using self-managing work teams with at least
some of their employees, many with no supervisor at all.
The role of the supervisor has evolved from the foreman of
early industrial organization. At the turn of the century,
this person was the expert who corrected mistakes, trained
and coached for efficient performance, and noticed and cared
if the job was done well. Without the foreman, work
gradually ended and workers sat idle.
Today, workers are often the experts, knowing more about
their work than their supervisors. They receive training
from specialists, and they often schedule and organize their
own work. And in many companies, for a few departments,
executives are eliminating the supervisor. As usual, the
primary aim is to make things better, to improve productivity
and morale, and to cut costs.
Susan Cohen, of U.S.C.'s Center for Effective
Organizations in Los Angeles, is interested in self-managed
work teams, and recently noticed a neglect of the subject in
others' research. To be sure, professors had offered
theories to explain how these teams function without a
supervisor, but no one had ever gone into the field to study
a large number of them. So Professor Cohen took on the
challenge. She found a large, cooperative telephone company,
and led a research team that studied 51 self-managed teams.
Cohen's group considered earlier theories and measured all
the major factors these professors thought might be
important. Next, Cohen compared the results with measures of
team performance taken at the same time: mid-level manager
ratings, teams' own perceptions of their performance, their
satisfaction working for the telephone company, and
absenteeism.
Several factors emerged in the analysis, and Cohen named
the most important quality employee involvement.
It involves training, information, resources, power, and
rewards. We
train
people to recognize the value and importance of
information
we give them about work processes, quality, customers,
business performance, competitors' actions, and
organizational changes. We give people
resources
to efficiently accomplish their work, and the
power
to make decisions that will help them make efficient use of
these resources.
And we tie
rewards
for individuals to team performance and the development of
capabilities. Self-managed teams reporting high levels of
these qualities were the best performing.
A big surprise emerged when Cohen compared supervisory
behaviors with performance. Earlier theorists had guessed
that if the supervisor was missing, other team members would
fill in by providing behaviors supervisors normally provide:
encouraging others' efforts, setting goals, monitoring and
evaluating performance, and criticizing poor performance.
Cohen discovered that self-managed teams reporting high
levels of these behaviors were the
worst
performing.
Professor Cohen explains that these supervisory behaviors
either caused poor performance or were a reaction to it, but
she suspects the former. She believes her findings should be
a caution to members of self-managed teams to refrain from
providing supervisory behaviors, and to executives not to
encourage them.
Cohen recommends executives select teams that work with
information who relate well with each other: customer service
people, for example. These executives should enhance
employee involvement factors, training, information,
resources, power, and rewards. She labels this effort
creating an empowering organization, and she believes
executives should focus on it if they want self-managed teams
to be successful.
Reference: Cohen, Susan G., Gerald E. Ledford, Jr., and Gretchen M.
Spreitzer (1996). A Predictive Model of Self-Managing Work Team Effectiveness.
Human Relations,
49 (5), 643-676.
Business Practice Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.
Self-Managed Teams
Researchers explore the factors that make work teams successful when they manage themselves.