Most of today’s businesses have become complex to the
point that the traditional “one leads all” method is often times the
least-effective way of running an entire organization (Obolensky, 2014). Since
there’s too much responsibility and information for a single leader to handle, we
rely on a team of people who practice self-management. As Paul Tesluk explained
in this week’s video, a self-managing team has formal responsibilities and
authorities to make their own decisions on how they organize and plan to get
their work done (INSEAD, 2008).
My current workplace heavily relies on self-managing
teams and they have both their benefits and drawbacks. Aside from splitting the
workload, one important aspect my organization obtain from self-managing teams
is that each team have and obtain unique information per-campus. As an online
university, my organization consist of over 100 campuses around the world to
provide advisement to current and prospective students. Due to demographic,
environmental, and other differences, some methods the university encourages us
to practice may not work for all campuses. For instance, my campus mainly
consist of Boeing employees. As many of them work at the typical 8-hour day and
travel constantly, we worry that telephone calls about non-urgent information
(such as on-campus offerings) would be a distraction to their work. Since many
of them prefer emails to begin with, we therefore send emails that provide the
information the campus wants us to distribute.
While each self-managing team split
the company’s workload and usually increase efficiency (due to unique set of
information), there are also some negative aspects to consider. Due to a number
of people working together, there is a higher risk of conflict. Conflicts in
the organization can occur either within or with other teams: as someone or a
group have a completely different view or idea of something (Kokemuller, n.d.).
Having strong support of one’s own ideas and operations can also increase the
risk of a group going off-track. This can create an assortment of problems that
could eventually hurt the entire organization. To minimize these drawbacks, it
is important for organizations to periodically check-in with teams to ensure
that they’re doing their jobs correctly and efficiently. Coaching, training,
and interviews are some examples that will help employees on track (Brown,
2011). For my case, the university offers mandatory as well as optional online
conferences in addition to an annual summit meeting that provide reviews and
brand new information. In some cases, these meeting allow us to provide and
share feedbacks with one another: which can help us learn and enhance our
everyday campus operations.
References:
References:
Brown, D. R. (2011). An experiential approach to
organization development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
INSEAD. (2008). Self-managing teams: debunking the
leadership paradox [Video file]. YouTube.
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=69&v=GBnR00qgGgM
Obolensky, N. (2014). Complex Adaptive Leadership:
Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty (2nd ed.). UK: Gower Publishing.
Kokemuller, N. (n.d.). The advantages &
disadvantages of teams in the workplace. Chron.
Retrieved from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-teams-workplace-21669.html
No comments:
Post a Comment