A model for team-based organizational performance

A model for team-based organizational performance.(Themes: Teams and New Product Development)

Author: Forrester, Russ ; Drexler, Allan B.

On the Side Benefits of Filing

We developed the team-based organization performance model as a result of going through some files in our consulting practice. As we looked through the files and recalled the companies in them, the model gradually emerged. What follows is a tidied-up version of our discovery, with the names of the companies and identifying details changed to respect their privacy.

The Wheelwright Information Services File

Wheelwright Information Services collects technical information and provides it to clients to use as a basis for research and development, technological investment, and other decisions. The Wheelwright database has more than 41 million records, and the company responds to more than three million requests for information annually. It conducts two gigantic operations: collecting and recording information, and responding to requests for information through various media from clients.

For most of its history, Wheelwright was a traditional hierarchical organization, organized by function and geographic region. Its operations are highly automated, with extraordinary standardization across work groups, extremely detailed production measurements, and close controls - a classic production system. In the early 1990s, a manager in the Systems Development Section deliberately introduced work teams into his organization, quickly achieved both reductions in costs and improvements in customer satisfaction, and was designated as a champion of the team concept to replicate his success throughout the organization. During the course of implementing this plan, we were called in to help. What we found was that Wheelwright had created some promising elements of a team-based organization, but hadn't found a good fit for them.

The impetus for change rested on the premise that what worked well in one environment would work as well in a much different environment, albeit in the same company. The major work of the organization didn't on the face of it involve much interdependence among group members. The whole culture of the organization was autocratic, with emphasis on central management, top-down decision making, and uniformity of practice. There was little interest in giving greater power to the groups to be relabeled as teams. The entire compensation system was highly sensitive to production and focused exclusively on how individuals performed in relation to their standards.

Our work with Wheelwright Information Services, through consultation and training of the staff designated to implement the change, consisted largely of sorting through these fundamental issues about forming a team-based organization, getting the needed parts in place, and building the support systems required. From this and similar work with other clients, the team-based organization performance model took shape. As shown in Figure 1, each element of the model is represented by a sphere labeled with the name of the element and the quality that results from handling it well. The sphere is bracketed by two sets of three features of the element. One set, the Keys, gives the focal points of attention and action to master the element. The other set, the Offkeys, describes the conditions that tend to result when the element or one of the Keys is not handled effectively.

Formation,(1) the first element, involves establishing the teams an organization needs and the setting in which they will work, and giving them the support they need to contribute to the organization most productively. The objective is to give teams the grounding they require to be successful, to shape the contours of the organization in ways that are friendly to teams, and to provide the kind of environment where teams can prosper, grow, and produce. The product of effectively managing formation issues is balance in the organization. Teams and other work units are in proportion, they fit together, make sense as a whole, have everything they need, and not much of what they don't.

Keys to Formation

Composition

The first concern for an organization is whether it has the pieces in place that it needs - teams formed where they can best do the work to be done, clear charters for each of them, and the right people on the right teams.

Coherence

This quality exists when all of an organization's parts hang together well. They fit and form a whole that is complete, internally consistent, and has what the organization needs to achieve its purposes. Some of the fits that have to be attended to are: between the best work processes that can be achieved and the use of teams as an organizational unit; among individual teams as they play their part in the work process; between the organization's philosophy of management, as practiced more than as espoused, and policies and practices related to the use of teams; and between team ownership or responsibility for work and members' involvement in decision making, control of resources, and other uses of power. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing an organization moving to a team basis is achieving a goodness of fit among all of its elements, systems, and dynamics.