Explain the concept of self-managed work team and discuss the major issues in managing work teams.
Self-managed Work Team
Self-managed work team refers to self-organized, semi-autonomous small group of employees whose members determine, plan and managed their day-to-day activities and duties under reduced or no supervision. Self-managed work teams are primarily based on work process rather than specialized departments as core work units. Typically, self-managed teams are group of 10- 15 employees who perform related or interdependent jobs. They select their own members and evaluate each other's performance. It increases productivity and satisfaction. However, the effectiveness of self-managed teams is dependent on situation. They have reduced the importance of supervisor position. Due to this reason, many companies in U.S. Europe, Japan are putting to their effort to developed self-managed team in their organizations.
Major Issues in Managing Work Teams
The major issues that need to be addressed in managing work-team are explained below.
1. Facilitate the adoption of TQM
The TQM requires encouragement to employee by management to share ideas and implement improvements. Team provides the vehicle for employees to share ideas and to implement improvement. The issue is how to make the work teams effective for quality problem solving, especially in terms of size, ability, resources, mobilization etc.
2. Workforce diversity on team performance
The strongest case for diversity on work teams is when these teams areengaged in problem- solving and decision-making tasks. Diverse groups have more difficulty working together and solving problem but this dissipate with time.
3. Increasing team effectiveness
An important issue is how to increase and maintain team effectiveness. For this, the following things should be taken into considerations.
- Prepare member to deal with the problem of maturity- remind them that they are not
- Offer refresher training
- Offer advanced training
- Encourage team to treat their development as a constant learning experience.
