Chapter 10:       IMPROVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH EMPOWERMENT, TEAMWORK, AND COMMUNICATION

 Advances in information technology have given firms powerful tools to help employees make decisions, work in teams, and share data. Chapter 10 focuses on how firms are empowering employees to make decisions, allowing them to work in teams, and encouraging them to communicate.  Today’s managers are allowing workers to make more decisions and take on wider responsibilities. This chapter focuses on the trend in today’s management style to empower employees by sharing information with them, allowing them to take more responsibility by working in groups, analyzing problems, making decisions, and advising management of their solutions. 

Five types of teams are commonly seen today. It identifies characteristics of a team and the stages of team development. The text then goes on to explain the importance of cohesiveness and norms within a team, and the factors that can cause conflict among team members.   Finally, the text covers the ways in which effective communication allows workers to share information that improves decision-making, the different types of communication, and how external communication is used to manage a public crisis.

1001 – Empowering Employees

An important component of management is the empowerment of employees. Managers empower employees by sharing information about issues such as the company’s financial performance and by giving them decision-making authority and responsibility in the workplace. Employees can also feel a greater stake in the continuing prosperity of the firm through worker ownership through employee stock ownership plans, through which employers buy company stock on behalf of employees. Stock options, through which employees have the opportunity to purchase stock at a specified price, is another type of worker ownership.

1002 – Teams

A team is a group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, approach, and set of performance goals. Teams are used widely throughout business because they allow corporations to pool their employees’ talent and ideas to achieve a higher level of success. There are five basic types of teams. Work teams are relatively permanent groups that do the day-to-day work of the organization. A problem-solving team is a temporary combination of workers who gather to address a specific problem and then disband once its task is completed. A self-managed team is a work team empowered to decide how its members complete their daily tasks. A cross-functional team combines workers from different functions on a permanent basis to work on specific problems or projects, bringing their many different perspectives and areas of expertise to the tasks at hand. Virtual teams are made up of geographically or organizationally dispersed workers who use telecommunications and information technology to accomplish an organizational task.

1003 – Team Characteristics

Effective teams have a number of shared characteristics. Although there is no one ideal size, most effective teams have fewer than 12 members, a number big enough to benefit from diverse skills, yet small enough for efficient communication and a sense of camaraderie. Two other important factors in team success are, Team diversity and team effectiveness, the average level of team members’ ability, experience, personality or other factors, called the team level. Teams typically develop in five stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. As a team moves through these stages, members become acquainted, disagree about and clarify their roles and expectations, resolve differences and reach agreement on roles, accomplish the tasks at hand, and finally disband. Teams are more effective when they develop team cohesiveness, the degree to which members are attracted to the team and motivated to remain part of it. Teams also develop team norms, the standard of conduct, both positive and negative, shared by team members. Most teams inevitably face some level of conflict, often disagreement over team goals and priorities. Some conflict can be good for teams, particularly cognitive conflict, which arises from problem-related differences of opinion that can ultimately strengthen outcomes. Less helpful is affective conflict, which refers to the emotional reactions that can arise when differences become personal. Clear communication with and among team members is often a manager’s most effective approach to managing team conflict.