Self-Managed Teams Research Paper

Self-managed teams grew into popularity during the 1960s. One may prefer self-managed teams over the average team with managers because of its cost efficiency and increased productivity, (if steps are implemented effectively). Though many may see self-managed teams as thebetter choice, they are certainly not right for every company. To performing to its best ability self-managed team must be ran in the correct manner, following aspects such as the 5 stages of development, norms and cohesiveness, task maintenance needs, team building, communication network, and all together while avoiding group think.

As the leader of a self-managed team, your members should be able to:

Make decisions about how they share and complete their work

Important inputs that are musts for an effective self managed team:

- Member characteristics

- Organizational setting

- Nature of task

- Team size

Characteristics to consider in the process of creating a self managing team:

- Members are accountable for performance results

- Members have discretion in distributing tasks within the team

- Members perform more than one job within the team

- Members perform multiple job skills

- Members evaluate one another’s contribution

- Members are responsible for quality of products

There are 5 stages of team development that are essential phases in the life cycle of self-managed teams:

Forming: The stage of interpersonal orientation and interpersonal testing.

- Members identify with each other as a team

- Establishment of relationships

- Discovering their role in the organization

- Learning new perspectives

Storming: The stage of conflict over tasks and working as a team

- Period of high emotionality

- Formation of subteams

- Disagreements emerge

- Members learn ...

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...eam. Although they are mostly held by leaders and managers, all members have the ability to host them.

There are two kinds of communication networks and they are:

Decentralized communication network: Which allow all members to communicate directly with one another

- The team interacts intensively

- Works close together

- Referred to as all channel or star communication network

Centralized communication network: Where communication flows only between individual members and a hub or centre point

- Individuals work on task separately

- Independent tasks divided among them

- Referred to as wheel or chain communication structure

While it seems that centralized communication networks work better to accomplishing simple tasks, as it is more time efficient, decentralized communication networks are more interactive and effective when it comes to working on complex tasks