Teams in the Work Place

Work teams today are being spoken of as the productivity breakthrough of the 1990s. The change represented by the use of work teams is often labelled as a "transformation" or the result of a "new paradigm". Whereas only 20 years ago work teams in the business environment were just being experimented with, a recent study by the American Productivity and Quality Center found that 80 per cent of the Fortune 1000 companies use some form of employee involvement programme, and 50 per cent of the respondents intend to increase the use of work teams[1].

In reality, teams have been around as long as man. They are not something that management has recently discovered and set into action. Take, for example, pre-historic man: if he had to kill a mammoth or do without supper, there was no time to draw up an organization chart, assign tasks, or delegate authority. Basically, the person who saw the mammoth from the farthest away was the Official Sighter, the one who ran the fastest was the Head Runner, whoever threw the most accurate spear was the the Grand Marksman, and the person all the other's most respected and listened to was the Chief[1]. The spontaneity shown in this example is exactly the type of behaviour so desperately sought in today's environment.

But what exactly is a team? Characteristically, a team is defined as a small group of people who do similar work, voluntarily meet on a regular basis to identify and analyse causes of problems, recommend their solution to management and, where possible, implement the solutions[2]. In other words, team participation is a collective idea power produced by employees taking responsibility for quality and productivity, managing their work, and developing their skills and knowledge about the organization and themselves. Such collective knowledge and resources will bring better decisions with greater support for implementation. As Ash explains, "People will support that which they help to create"(cited in [3]).

History of Teams

As previously stated, teams have been around as long as man has been around. However, in businesses this is not the case. In fact, until recently work was being designed to alleviate the types of teams we view as so critical to today's business. In early US history we saw the development of the first crude productivity teams. The need was to manufacture muskets for the revolutionary army. Responding to that need, Whitney created an assembly-line work environment to help speed up production. This type of environment accomplished the goal beyond anyone's expectation and, therefore, remained popular until the turn of the century[4].

At this time, Frederick Taylor introduced "scientific management" in which he advocated the division of labour into small repetitive tasks that could be completed by basically unskilled workers. This concept was widely implemented because it meant that unskilled immigrants could be put to use in the industries with only minor training[4].

In the late 1950s Deming and Juran began to implement their statistical management ideas in which management attempts to find ways for hands-on workers to contribute to the overall quality concepts. The ideas did not receive a warm welcome in the USA but were eagerly accepted by the Japanese who were struggling to overcome a reputation for poor quality after the Second World War. An engineering professor at Tokyo University, Dr Ishikawa, helped to spread Deming's and Juran's ideas around Japan. The result was the establishment of 20 quality circles by mid-1961 which were specifically designed for hands-on workers to discuss quality problems and develop ways to correct the problems. The success of quality circles spread rapidly across the workforce of Japan, and as of 1988 there were one million quality circles with more than 10 million members throughout the country. Also, by 1988, Japan had become known for its superior quality of many products[5].

Even on seeing the successes in Japan, US manufacturers were slow to follow Japan's example. It was not until 1970 that quality circles appeared in the USA at a Lockheed manufacturing plant. Proctor and Gamble also began to experiment with teams in the early 1970s but remained closemouthed about the results. It was not until a 1986 Business Week report[6] that any information became available. That article reported that P&G's team plants were 30-40 per cent more productive than the non-team plants. Other team-work pioneers such as DEC, TRW and Commins Engine reported similar results[1].

The High-performance Team

Most researchers agree that there are a few distinct qualities that set apart the high-performance teams. Although the wording may be different, the ideas are the same: high performance teams have participative leadership,