Team Empowerment - Essay Example

The employees follow the instructions relayed by the managers and there is very little participation as a team. The team members do not have an intricate caring for the task and this results in reduced performance throughput from the team as a whole. The traditional heroic model of leadership is followed and the leadership authority resides with individuals, based on their level of hierarchy.

Why team empowerment is important

Being a manager I understand the need to make the employees in the team perform with an intrinsic caring for their tasks. Team empowerment is defined as increased motivation in the team at performing a task due to team members’ collective, positive assessments of their relationship to tasks within the organization (Kirkman, Rosen, 2000). As the motivation factor lacking in the organization, the effort put into the task by the team is low, resulting in poor performance.

Self-leadership has been defined as “the influence we exert on ourselves to achieve self-motivation and self-direction we need to perform” (Manz and Sims, 1991, pg.23). Self-leadership qualities are a must with team leaders and managers. As the leaders, a majority of them in my organization lacks these leadership skills the teams fail to succeed. The expectations are unclear, the roles and responsibilities of the team members are not elaborate and this results in missed deadlines and duplication of effort. There is poor communication within the teams and the teams are not well organized due to a lack of self-leadership qualities amongst the leaders.

Organizations are now increasingly facing high levels of dynamic, complex changes and environmental uncertainties (Champy, Nohria, 1997). In my organization, the lack of efficient facilitators has resulted in poor role clarity and poor understanding of the organization's objectives. There are numerous conflicts within the organization and the conflict resolution process has to be handled better.

Possible solutions to the team empowerment problem

I have discussed employee empowerment in the previous discussion. Team empowerment is integral to the success of the organization and this is possible only by an innovative and skilled facilitator.  I suggest implementing the role of the team facilitator as a person involved in the improvement of the team. Facilitation can be done by making use of the behavior which is involved with individual members’ role within the group and the operation of the team as a whole and the maintenance behavior which deals with providing support and encouragement to the group members by facilitating their interaction and involving them in decision making (Raelin, 2003).

The facilitator must be flexible enough to form self-directed work teams which seek to empower people and give them greater control over their work (fisher, 2000). The team has to be made up in such a manner that they can decide on who should perform which task, according to their capability. Team empowerment will result in a high-performing team and thus lead to organizational success.