| Organizational Behavior: Solutions for Management Paul D. Sweeney,
University of Central Florida Dean B. McFarlin,
University of Dayton
Designing Motivating Jobs and High Performance Teams
Chapter Outline- Turning To Teams--Effective behavior management increasingly involves groups
of employees.
- Approximately 70% of Fortune 1000 companies use self-managed teams
to handle the tasks of making a product or delivering a service.
- Some experts consider the team, not the individual, to be the fundamental
unit in today's modern corporation.
- Teams present special challenges that put managers' behavior skills
to the test.
- Designing Jobs That Work For Employees
- Timing the Work:
- One type of job redesign involves modifying when the work is performed.
- The most popular timing techniques are compressed schedules and
flextime.
- Compressed schedules: allow employees to complete a 40-hour week
in less than five days. Mixed opinions from experts as to the effects
compressed schedules have on absenteeism, turnover, and productivity.
- Flextime: flexible work schedules:
- Gives employees control over when they work.
- Two parts of a flextime system:
- A set of core hours that everyone must work
- Some flexible hours Advantages to flextime:
- Lowers workers absenteeism.
- Drawbacks to flextime:
- Drop in service quality
- Difficult to implement and maintain when a requisite number of
employees must be available to work together at the same time.
- Enlarging and Rotating Jobs:
- Job rotation: shifting workers to different jobs at periodic intervals.
- Job enlargement: combining multiple tasks once performed by several
people into one job.
- Advantages of these techniques:
- Decrease boredom
- Increase variety
- Can help to create a more skilled and flexible work force.
- Disadvantage of these techniques:
- The training costs imposed on the organization.
- Initially, productivity may suffer as workers adjust.
- Neither actually redesigns the work itself.
- Job Enrichment: Changing the Way Work Gets Done:
- Job enrichment involves making fundamental changes in the way work
gets done.
- The goal of job enrichment is to make work more interesting and
motivating.
- The job characteristics model:
- Can help managers diagnose whether a particular job needs to
be enriched.
- This model is nearly thirty years old and argues that a mind-set
change is necessary on the part of the employees.
- Three critical psychological states needed for a mind-set change
to occur that managers can create by altering jobs:
- Employees must feel their work is meaningful.
- Employees must feel they are responsible for their own jobs.
- Employees must know how well they are doing.
- Leverage points for creating these psychological states----five
core characteristics:
- Skill variety
- Task identity
- Task significance
- Autonomy
- Feedback
- Practicing enrichment:
- Ways managers can alter the core characteristics:
- Vertical job loading: combining various tasks requiring different
sets of skills into one job.
- Horizontal job loading: more tasks are added to a job without
requiring additional skills.
- Designing Jobs Around Teams--Teams are a complex subject and it should
be remembered that not all groups are teams.
- Groups Versus Teams:
- A work team is a small number of people with complementary skills
who are committed to a common purpose and set of goals for which they
hold themselves mutually accountable.
- A team produces more than the sum of individual efforts.
- Teams: More Popular than Ever: One estimate claims that over 70%
of all U.S. firms have at least some employees working in teams. Experts
predict this number will continue to rise.
- Distinguishing Between TeamsEven though not all teams are the same,
there are some commonalities between them.
- Advisory Teams: Having Your Say:
- Advisory teams: typically referred to as quality circles or quality
teams; involve 10-20 people from the same department who meet a few
hours per week to suggest solutions to problems.
- Group is usually formed for the long run
- Popular in early 1980s
- Reasons for the proliferation of quality circles:
- Accessibility
- Minimal dispute
- Image enhancement
- Quality circles essentially became a fad at least in the U.S. but
this fad faded rather quickly due to lack of actual effectiveness
of the circles.
- Self-Managed Work Teams: Running Your Own Show:
- Self-managed work teams: small group of employees that is responsible
for an entire work process.
- About 30% of all U.S. firms use SMTs.
- How do SMTs operate in theory?
- Typically composed of 5-20 people who work together on a daily
basis.
- Permanent groups
- Team runs itself
- Controls its own: schedule, assignment selection, performance
goals, and allocation of necessary resources.
- Different from traditional groups in that SMTs:
- Are less hierarchical
- Leader is more coach than cop
- Reward systems tend to be skill based
- Productivity data, sales figures, profit levels, and the like
are shared with all team members.
- Members are expected to learn many jobs not just perform an
isolated piece of work.
- How do SMTs operate in practice?
- Most common function is to set its own schedule followed by
training, goal setting, and directly dealing with the customer.
Uncommon for SMTs to: hire, fire, or do their own budgeting.
- Opting for SMTs:
- Decision for development of an SMT should be done with much
thought.
- SMTs can work particularly well in manufacturing or service
companies provided the starting point is a set of sequentially
linked tasks.
- The more complex the work, the better suited for SMTs.
- Implementation challenges with SMTs:
- Converting to SMTs can take from 18 months to several years.
- Managers can have a difficult time letting go of authority
over the teams and allowing them to manage themselves.
- Inefficient training cited as the most common challenge for
SMTs.
- Second most common implementation problem is supervisor resistance.
- Lack of management and union support.
- Are SMTs effective?
- Studies have shown that employees who are in SMTs have higher
job satisfaction.
- These employees also have higher absenteeism and turnover rates
than traditionally organized employees.
- Managerial behaviors to help ensure the success of SMTs:
- Share information
- Share knowledge
- Share power
- Share rewards
- Cross-Functional Teams:
- Cross-functional teams: composed of employees from different areas
of the organization who are brought together to work on the same project.
Utilized by many different types of organizations:
- Ford motor company
AT&T
Boeing
- CFTs are a step beyond advisory teams.
- Task forces are a temporary form of CFTs.
- CFTs can be hard to start and manage.
- CFTs seem to be better suited for industries with rapidly changing
markets where the need to move quickly is vital
- Technology can "follow" employees everywhere, which results
in employee stress.
- Technology can produce waste and inefficiencies.
- Virtual Teams:
- Virtual teams: consists of people who are physically dispersed
but function as a team through the use of videoconferencing, e-mail,
or other electronic media.
- Predicted to grow in the future due to:
- Rapid growth in technology
- Increase in international mergers
- Explaining Team Success and Failure
When responsibility is unclear, a threat to team effectiveness may emerge.
- Social loafing: tendency for team members to put out less effort
in the team than they would if they were working alone. Ways to prevent
social loafing: Make individual performance prominent More prevalent in
the U.S.
- Other problems include: Members have problems letting go of previous
authority roles. Burden falls on those with more knowledge. Management-related
problems: Lack of commitment Appraisals and rewards that do not match
the team concept
- Designing and Building Teams:
Many of the problems can be solved with a solid team-building approach.
- Careful thought and planning are the keys to a successful
team.
- Team building is the process of developing a commitment to
work together, trust other members, and interact in a cohesive
way.
- Team building steps:
- Choose members
- A lot of training
- Monitoring and rewarding
- Selecting team members:
- Develop a target size for the teams.
- Usually teams with 4-12 members are successful; 10-12 members
are ideal.
- Selection of people with high ability who are team players.
- The key is the candidate screening process for group and
team fit.
- Characteristics of an effective team player include:
- Appropriate technical skills
- Good listening and communication skills
- A willingness to commit to team goals
- Ability to trust other team members and management
- Training the team:
- Inadequate training is possibly the biggest problem.
- To deliver training companies can:
- Use classroom lecturing mixed with cases and exercises
- Corporate or group retreat
- Utilize the outdoor experience
- Outward Bound programs
- Trust is perhaps the most difficult thing to develop in
groups.
- To establish trust management should:
- Display a serious long-term interest in implementing teams.
- Monitoring and rewarding the team:
- Some experts suggest that building and sustaining high-performance
teams takes 3-5 years.
- Management must be involved in helping to channel but not
control the teams.
- Management can be performed by "walking around" and simply
asking how the individuals are doing.
- Team reward (pay systems) can be difficult to implement.
- Pay to QCs is rarely given on a group basis.
- Most CFTs are temporary in nature.
- Experts suggest using one-time cash awards, various types
of recognition, or merit pay increases to compensate these
types of groups.
- More significant compensatory changes are usually made
for SMTs and other more intact work groups.
- Members often view delaying pay changes until after the
group has worked together as acceptable.
- Team based pay system.
- When the pay system changes modification to performance
methods need to also.
- Managerial suggestions for establishing a fair and motivating
pay system for teams:
- Have team members help develop the appraisal system
- Study it and then study it again
- Customize and adjust
- Keep it simple
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