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CHANGING ATTITUDES AND CULTURE 21

What we have seen in the past decade has been both the recognition of teams as
an organizational option and the formal attention given to the team approach by se-
nior management so that the traditional motivational and reward strategies of the
firm can be redesigned to cover team activities. For instance, Cleland quotes the
following from the 1993 Annual Report of the General Electric Company: “The use
of teams at GE has brought about major changes in training, performance ap-
praisal, and compensation systems—for example, ‘360-degree appraisals,’ in which
peers and those above and below an individual evaluate performance. Employees
are paid on the basis of the skills they attain rather than just the work they perform.”

Unfortunately, this vision has not been universally shared. Several organiza-
tions retain individual measurement and reward systems that fail to recognize a
person’s contributions to project success and the growth in potential gained from
exposure to new learning and experiences. This would be counterindicated in this
age where we have begun to seriously count knowledge and our human resources
on the asset side of the ledger sheet. Some organizations have also been slow to
break down the rigid boundaries that impede the application of the team concept.

When organizing for projects, you need to be prepared to make changes to the
organizational structure and to make cultural changes that will allow the struc-
tural changes to be effective.

Changing Attitudes and Culture

For the contemporary enterprise that is heavily engaged in projects, the options
come down to some kind of matrix or team operation. Yet, moving in that direc-
tion will not assure success. This kind of change also requires changes in atti-
tudes—changes in the entire organizational culture. In this regard, there is no
choice. Failure to bring about the operational and attitudinal changes that will al-
low the matrix or team approaches to work will lead to failure of the projects
themselves, and possibly failure of the entire enterprise.

This is easier said than done. The changes at the individual contributor level
are not that difficult. But at the managerial level, it’s a different story. In the Ma-
trix Organization, it calls for a sharing of responsibility and leadership between
the project manager and the functional managers. In the team environment, it
calls for a diminished role for the managers with transference of many leadership
functions to the team members. This control, inherent in the more traditional or-
ganizational styles, is hard to surrender.

For the individual contributors, the common issues are career development,
recognition, and reward. In the older, more tightly structured organizational
systems, there was always a direct, solid-line link between the individual con-
tributor and the manager. The manager was entrusted with the responsibility