Team as an Ideal Design of Job - Essay Example

One of the common practices that are experienced now is the use of teams in a business setting. (Benders, J., 1999) It is argued that in future, the popularity of teams will increase because of the possibilities that have been observed to be afforded by the virtuality and the fact that access to a wide range of temporary and geographically disperse skills of labor is available. A way from that it is also clear that the managers and organizations highly benefit from this kind of labor considering that it is flexible and a work unit that is self-making. (Bishop, S.K., 1999) The paper will try examining issues that revolve around the work of the team and their significance in working with the managers. Team as an ideal design of job It is possible for managers to create a work unit by just bringing together many individuals with different skills. Before a manager designs a task that they need to be handled, it is always clear that they have a picture of the nature of the outcome they desire. (Cascio, W.F., 2000) They also have idea on which kind of input is required and what would be the process needed to realize the objective. It is through this understanding that the manger may decide to have a group of individuals to execute the work. This kind of approach has been associated with an authoritarian guidance by some manager. (Hinds, P.J. & Bailey, D.E., 2000) Workers who are involved in a process like this are always denied their autonomy and have very low worker interdependence. Study however show that the productivity of a work force is usually increased when workers have a high sense of interdependence as opposed to when workers are just pulled together to execute certain tasks. It is therefore right to say that team task design is a good design that managers can use to push for results to be gotten but only if the worker interdependence is enhanced. It should not be assumed that team interdependent is the sole mechanism that can be used by mangers to help in utilizing the team and produce successfully. There are some other ways through which teams can be used to realize the objective of an organization. A team as a unit requires some level of self direction and self management to realize certain objective. When teams have control of themselves, then they tend to engage in participatory approach of work, which also relieves the top management from micromanaging the teams and ever getting concerned with small matters that can be addressed at lower levels. It is imperative that mangers delegate duties to the juniors so that they may get preoccupied with bigger matters at managerial level. However, this should not be so much that renders the organization directionless thus resulting into absolute loss of control. It is therefore true to say that use of the teams can be a good way of completing tasks that do not require the manager to get involved on minor matters at all time. It is noted that whenever organization ceases to use authoritarian model as a leadership strategy and adopt the self-managed workforce, then it follows that the product development cycle is highly accelerated and the performance among the employee is increase. This would eventually result to improved production in a company. Some researchers have also suggested that level of production may increase among some employees when they work as a team rather than when they work in a traditional work arrangement settings. (Musselwhite, W.C.,1988) Some of the things that have been suggested to be important for increase production rate include; motivation, sense of responsibility., autonomy as well as participative and democratic leadership. These are the conditions that are much desired among team to ensure that the production level is improved highly. For a high level of production to be sustained, studies reveal that managers need to intervene lesser and lesser in the production process by the team. Increased worker satisfaction has been noted to have the potential or minimizing anti-task behaviors, misdirection of work, as well as low productivity. The actual work design that can successfully work for the manager is noted to be when the manager links a self-directed team with a cross-functional flavor. Cross functionality has been noted to have the ability to produce specialty among the work force. It is also noted to have the ability of reducing the possibility of rework as well as unacceptable behaviors, delays in information transfer as well as redundancy of the process. In as much as teams are many at times co-located, it is not obvious that they have to be collated. (Dustdar, S. & Gall, H., 2002) Virtual teams should be able to provide manager with groups that are not necessarily geographically together or even synchronous temporarily. Since virtual teams do not have to be with the mangers in their offices in order to have the work done, managing such a team becomes easier and can always ensure high productivity without use of much resource. What such a manger needs to consider is the fact that they could be certain that when such virtual team is used when out of town or out of the country, the return would not be compromised at all and that such move can prove to be much beneficial than when traditional office arrangement is done. (Farr-Wharton, R.,2002). Use of team is an important aspect of production that needs to be natured highly. It is one of the ways managers can ensure that they maximize production. With the emerging trends such as virtual team, this job design is growing to be a preferred way of operation in many organizations References Benders, J. (1999). “Teams and their context: moving the team discussion beyond existing Dichotomies”. Journal of Management Studies, 36, 5, 609-627. Bishop, S.K. (1999). Cross-functional project teams in functionally aligned organizations. Project Management Journal, 30, 3, 6-12. Cascio, W.F. (2000). “Managing a virtual workplace”. Academy of Management Executive, 14 , 3, 81-91. Dustdar, S. & Gall, H. (2002). “Process awareness for distributed software development in virtual teams”. Proceedings of the 28th Euromicro Conference, 244-251. Farr-Wharton, R. (2002). Multimedia projects and the optimum choice of individuals and teams. International Journal of Project Management, 21, 271-280. 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