Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael M. Beyerlein is the director of the Center for the Study of Work Teams and professor of industrial/organizational psychology at the University of North Texas. He is the author and editor of numerous books including Beyond Teams: Building the Collaborative Organization (Pfeiffer).

Craig McGee is a consultant with more than twenty years experience in change management.and coauthor of Beyond Teams: Building the Collaborative Organization (Pfeiffer).

Gerald Klein is associate professor of organizational behavior and management in the College of Business Administration Behavior and Management in the College of Business Administration at Rider University.

Jill E. Nemiro is an assistant professor in the Behavioral Sciences Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Laurie Broedling is the vice chair of the California Team Excellence Award Council and the president of the LB Organizational Consulting.

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The Collaborative Work Systems Fieldbook is a comprehensive reference that offers practitioners a resource for dealing with the challenges of designing and implementing collaborative work systems in value chains, organizational networks, partnerships with stakeholders, web-based teams, cross-functional teams, strategic alliances, and team-based organizations. The Collaborative Work Systems Fieldbook is filled with ideas, examples, and tools and includes a wealth of matrices, margin notes, and symbols that make locating relevant information easy. Part of The Collaborative Work Systems series and based in part on principles introduced in the flagship book— Beyond Teams, This Fieldbook is written for change leaders, OD managers, steering team members, design team members, line managers, and functional leaders who need a hands-on resource for dealing with collaborative work systems issues.

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The Collaborative Work Systems Fieldbook

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

A Top Ten List

Michael M. Beyerlein and Cheryl L. Harris

Over the last few decades, work teams have become a popular method for increasing speed, productivity, employee involvement, and collaboration in organizations. This increased use of work teams created the need for organizations to redesign themselves to support those teams. Afull redesign effort produces a team-based organization (TBO). However, that term connotes an ending point. The term "team-based organizing" represents continuous improvement and continuous reinvention. This chapter identifies the top ten principles of the design and implementation of team-based organizing in the form of critical success factors.

Our definition of team-based organizing applies to an organization that has the following in place:

Teams as the basic unit of accountability and work

Teams leading teams

An organizational design to support teams

The team-based organizing approach differs radically from the historically dominant approach that focuses on the individual as the unit of accountability, leadership, and support. Team-based organizing is NOT about teams; it is about the organization! Most publications and most examples focus on individual teams. The leap from team to team-based system of work is as large as the leap from individual work to team work. Redesign to a TBO demands redesign of the organization as a whole. The environment the teams work in is critical to their performance level, so redesigning the whole makes effectiveness possible at the lower level.

The goal of team-based organizing is to maximize the ability to cooperate and collaborate appropriately. Collaboration takes time, effort, and investment that working individually does not. Appropriate collaboration occurs when there is:

Need of diverse expertise;

Need to build commitment through participation; Need to create synergies with the expertise; and A supportive environment in place.

Collaborative work may not be the best approach when these factors are not present. Working solo is fine when it can achieve performance goals.

Each organization is unique, so there is no roadmap to follow. However, there are principles to guide the journey. Following are ten critical success factors (CSFs) to make appropriate collaboration successful. Please note that these CSFs are not the same as the principles of collaborative organization established in the first book in the Collaborative Work Systems series. However, the CSFs do not contradict the principles of collaborative organization, and do overlap somewhat. We believe that our CSFs warrant discussion in their own right, here in this chapter. Acomparison of the CSFs and principles of collaborative organization can be seen in Table 1.1.

CSF #1: Align the Organization in Multiple Ways

An organization consists of one system embedded in another, which is embedded in another, and so on, like a nesting dolls toy. Each subsystem is a component of the larger system it resides in and a context for its own components. The most familiar version of this complexity now is that of an ecosystem. And, like an ecosystem, there is interdependence between systems and levels. Alignment is a measure of how well those systems coordinate with each other.

Align Across Systems

Is alignment important? In an automobile traveling down the freeway at 70 miles per hour, a tiny misalignment of the front wheels is noticeable and potentially dangerous. In a company, misalignment also displays "wobbles" and pulls the operation toward the ditch. Alignment is crucial across systems of any organization; effectiveness is directly proportional to it. However, when implementing a major redesign effort such as an initiative to become team-based, alignment has added dimensions for concern. The focus on alignment should be one of the primary principles driving each decision of the redesign. Without such a focus, the following occurs: "These interventions were fragile, and were swamped within months or years by dominant organizational cultures that were static and hierarchical in nature.... where changes did result in productivity improvements, it was not long before these innovations gave way to more traditional work systems compatible with the dominant management mindsets" (Cordery, 2000).

Align Change Initiative with Vision

Returning to the auto on the highway again, the driver usually has a destination in mind. Staying on the road is partly a survival issue and partly about goal accomplishment. The vision may articulate that company destination. If the executive effort has been made to share that vision often, well, and widely, it generates an alignment of effort. Any change initiative that contradicts the shared vision will fail. Alignment of the teaming initiative with the vision is essential. An initiative gains acceptance, support, and commitment when alignment is visible.

Align Across Change Initiatives

Typically, companies have multiple change initiatives underway. Initiatives such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), business process reengineering (BPR), total quality management (TQM), lean manufacturing, and others may accompany TBO. The initiatives are typically handled as isolated islands of change, thought, and control and end up competing for resources. An integration of the initiatives through design and oversight, as with a cross-initiative committee, provides the opportunity for alignment.

Align Across Teams

Alignment across teams is crucial for performance leaps. After interviewing managers in major corporations, Steve Jones (1999) concluded that 80 percent of the payoff from using teams occurred between the teams. Improvements in the flow of work occurred because the teams aligned with each other through direct communications.

Align Support Systems and Teams

Most teams fail because of lack of alignment between support systems and teams (Beyerlein & Harris, 2001; Mohrman, Tenkasi, & Mohrman, 2000). Teams are social systems with a hunger for information and resources. When given what they need, the teams can excel. On the other hand, they are typically malnourished, trying to perform without the necessary inputs from support systems and support personnel, including managers, HR, IT, engineering, shipping, and others. However, recognize that achieving alignment between teams and support is likely to require overcoming significant barriers and inertia, including changes in assessment, evaluation, reward systems, and processes.

Align Across Subcultures

There are subgroups and subcultures within an organization. Schein (1996) suggests that the differences in culture between management, engineering, and production are so large that it is as if they were living in different countries. Another major gap is between union and nonunion employees. Alignment across these boundaries can be achieved through participation in the change initiative. Creating a steering team with a vertical slice of the organization as a membership criterion provides the opportunity for input from all the subgroups, so shared understanding can unite them across their current boundaries.

Align with Business Environment

Finally, although teams fail for many reasons, they also fail when the business fails. Alignment of the business strategy with the business environment, including competition and customer needs, is an essential envelope within which to work on the internal alignment issues.

CSF #2: The Work Must Be Conducive to Teams

The work encompasses the task that needs to be completed. Placing work in the center of the change model emphasizes the point that the purpose of organizations is to complete business, whatever that may be. Therefore, the organization must have a business, work-related reason for converting to teams for the transition to be successful.

For team-based organizing to be successful, the organization must have work that is appropriate for teams, that is, interdependent tasks that require more than one person to complete them. However, today, because of the increasingly complex work environment, most work is interdependent, especially over the long term, so teams are appropriate in many situations. For companies involved with team-based organizing, the majority of the work should be team appropriate.

Contrary to popular myth, however, not all tasks are team tasks, and all organizations would be wise to recognize this and act accordingly. Sometimes work that seems inappropriate for teams actually is; it simply seems to lack interdependence because of the functional structure imposed on it. In this case, work process redesign may uncover interdependent work that is amenable to a team. Or it may be that an individual is most appropriate for the task. The key is to match the type of work to the appropriate mechanism for carrying out the work, whether it is a team or an individual.

Some situations may warrant redesign of the work to become more suitable for a team. Would a team better accomplish the work than would individuals? Are there "hidden" interdependencies that suggest the use of a team? Would value be added by accomplishing the task with a team? Answering these questions will help determine locations where work redesign is appropriate. Work process mapping is one effective tool for identifying these opportunities graphically. (See Jacka & Keller, 2001.)

In team-based organizing companies, the team is responsible for a whole piece of work, so the work is not as segmented. The whole piece of work is usually process or product focused. For example, a team could be responsible for an entire assembly line, rather than the traditional approach in which each individual does his part and throws it to the next person, without regard for the final product.

Work that is conducive to teams creates an opportunity and the need for a team, but not the team itself. Teams represent a complex solution that is too costly when individuals can do the job, but a wise investment when outcomes depend on collaboration.

CSF #3: Teamwork Must Fit with and Connect to the Environment

The environment includes the forces outside the organization, for example, government regulations, communities, competitors, customers, and suppliers.

Historically, changes in organizational design have followed trends in the environment. A traditional, hierarchical organization was appropriate in the 19th Century and part of the 20th. However, the environment has changed, requiring new, flatter, more collaborative forms of organization. Some of the characteristics of today's environment that are creating a need for team-based organizing include globalization, the fast pace of change, rapidly changing technology, increased complexity, and permeable organizational boundaries.

Because of the fast-changing environment, companies utilizing TBO must create continuous links to that environment. They must have mechanisms to create awareness of the environment and build in ways to change accordingly in order to survive and thrive. Examples abound of organizations that did not survive changes in the environment. Just think of all the organizations that were around at the turn of the 20th Century; how many of them survived to the turn of the 21st? Not many. Strategic planning is partially based on scanning the environment. In traditional organizations, strategy is viewed as the province of top management. In the TBO, all members are responsible for scanning, and teams may contribute to strategic planning (for example, Fogg, 1994).

CSF #4: Craft a Culture of Collaboration and Cooperation

Culture can be defined as a pattern of shared organizational values, basic underlying assumptions, and informal norms that guide the way work is accomplished in an organization. For teams to be most effective, the organization's values, assumptions, and norms must support collaboration and cooperation.

A metaphor for a team-based organizing culture is "teams in the DNA." Organizations that have "teams in the DNA" are so committed to cooperation and collaboration that employees automatically think, "Let's put a team on it" when they see a problem. They immediately understand how to begin a team, how to end one, and the processes in between. Some characteristics of "teams in the DNA" culture include a teams mindset, wherein collaboration is efficient and habitual; respect for expertise instead of position; self-sufficient teams run their own businesses; continuous improvement, shared responsibility, autonomy, and authority; the ability to make decisions pushed to where the work is done; all employees engaged and committed; a "not me" but "we" mindset; and an egalitarian atmosphere of trust and respect.

An important, and often overlooked, part of the organization consists of the informal, natural processes that happen as a part of human nature. Humans are social beings and naturally create relationships, networks, and communities and share learnings. The successful TBO remembers this and strives for a culture to enhance, rather than detract from, the informal. These organizations create the space for connections via time, place, resources, and norms.

Understanding both the existing and the desired organization culture is key to creating successful change. Without heed to the existing culture, change initiatives may begin in the wrong place, leaving people feeling frustrated and angry about the gaps and overlaps. Without some emphasis on understanding the desired culture, initiatives have no hook to the future, no energy, and eventually flounder. Successful change initiatives must provide the link between the two.

Culture is either difficult or impossible to change directly, depending on whom you ask. Changing the organizational structure and adjusting systems represent indirect ways to influence culture.

CSF #5: Structure the Organization with an Array of Teams

Organizational structure includes the ways people are formally organized to carry out the work. An organization chart is how this is traditionally depicted. However, the formal chart does not necessarily match the reality of the organization. Charts may be incomplete or out-of-date. They seldom depict types of teams.

Successful team-based organizing requires using a variety of team types to support different types of work. Because the environment shifts constantly, the organization must be able to use different types of teams to meet the needs of varying situations quickly. Teams can be temporary or permanent, single function or multi-function, inside one organization or across several, and with co-located or distributed membership. Project and task teams are temporary, usually with cross-functional membership; they come together for a particular purpose and disband when that purpose is achieved. Project teams have become more popular as a method of dealing with the quickly changing environment. Work teams are typically permanent, long-term teams, with either single-function or cross-function membership. Management teams are comprised of management members from multiple functions, each usually concerned with particular issues. Virtual teams may never meet face-to-face and instead rely on technology for communication. As the boundaries of organizations become more permeable, more teams have members from more than one organization.

A common belief is that team-based organizing requires permanent work teams, and some believe that this is the only kind of team that can be used. However, we argue that team-based organizing can encompass any type of team and believe that successful efforts require the use of an array of teams.

CSF #6: Reinforce Cooperation and Collaboration with Organizational Systems

Organizational systems form the infrastructure created to support the work and the people doing the work within the organization. Through modifying and creating systems, team-based organizing enables cooperation and collaboration within the organizational context. Because of the need to align with the work and the rapidly changing environment, flexibility in organizational systems is key. As the work processes and structures change, support systems must change to maintain alignment.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Collaborative Work Systems Fieldbook Copyright © 2003 by Michael M. Beyerlein. Excerpted by permission.
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