Page 359 - Business Principles and Management

Unit 4

FIGURE 13-11 Self-directed work teams have more authority and
responsibility for their work than do traditional teams.

Traditional Self-Directed
WORK TEAM WORK TEAM

Work Categories Many narrow tasks One or two broad
tasks

Team leader controls Team controls tasks
Worker Authority all tasks done daily through group
decisions

Based on type of Based on team
Rewards job, on individual performance plus
worker performance, breadth of skills
and on seniority of individual team
members

Teams need top-management support as well as skills in these three areas
to do well. New teams must have both time and support to be able to mature to
their full potential.

CHECKPOINT

Who is responsible for traditional management functions in
a team organization?

Improving Business Organization

Traditionally, businesses have used centralized organization, in which a few top
managers do all major planning and decision making. Studies of the effect of
business organization on quality and productivity have discovered that central-
ized organizations cause problems in some companies. Large companies often
develop very complex centralized organizational structures. Those structures
may cause communication problems and the need for many policies and rules to
control the organization. Individual managers and employees then begin to feel
like unimportant parts of the business. They get frustrated when rules keep them
from doing things they consider important or when it takes a long time to get
decisions made.
To overcome these types of problems, companies are moving to decentralized
organization. In this structure, a very large business is divided into smaller operating
units, and unit managers have almost total responsibility and authority for the oper-
ation of their units. In many ways, the units operate as if they were independent
companies. For example, a large computer manufacturer could be decentralized
into work units by categories of products (mainframes, personal computers, acces-
sory equipment) or by types of customers (industrial, government, international).

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