Viewpoint

Citation

Beyerlein, M. (1998), "Viewpoint", Team Performance Management, Vol. 4 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/tpm.1998.13504baa.002

Viewpoint

Michael Beyerlein

Work teams in some form or other are gradually spreading around the world in a wide variety of work settings. For example, Lawler, Mohrman, and Ledford (1995) reported that since their 1987 survey the use of self-managing work teams (SMWT's) in Fortune 1000 companies increased from 68 per cent to 91 per cent (e.g., the company used SMWTs some place within the organization). Recently, Porto (1997) did a less extensive survey of 50 companies recently. Among the results she obtained over 50 per cent and sometimes over 75 per cent of the sample believed that the use of teams in various forms would continue to increase and rewards systems would change to fit teams better. However, there have been a number of companies where retrenchment has occurred; within specific plants or at the corporate level, there has been a strong tendency to scrap the work done to support teams and to re-institute more traditional practices. There seems to be some contradictory data about how fast teams are spreading, and there are some examples of retrenchment that diminish the extent of the use of teams, but in general they are being used more and more. The question of this viewpoint column is, "why aren't they spreading faster?" I will suggest three answers to that question, recognizing that the best answer may some combination of the three responses or that it may be something I do not yet know.

Retrenchment and secrecy

First, the spread is not well represented by surveys. Surveys have been conducted by researchers and consultants for over ten years. The survey sampling and results are adequate to show trends, but as with most data collection, the results are not current and the samples are not exhaustive. It takes time to conduct a survey of hundreds or thousands of organizations and to analyze and report the results. Secondly, the surveys typically focus on the Fortune 1000 in the US and similar types of samples in the UK and other countries. Organizations that qualify for the Fortune 1000 typically employ 5,000 people or more and as many as 500,000; so, the question becomes, "what individual is qualified to speak for his or her whole company in responding to a survey?" Also, some information is proprietary. For example, Procter and Gamble has treated information about its work teams as an industrial secret for over 30 years, and I am aware of companies in such diverse fields as tire manufacture and banking that follow the same policy of secrecy. And, the samples typically ignore medium and small size companies and non-business sectors such as government and nonprofit organizations. However, useful surveys have been done that show a trend of increased team utilization in the work place.

Innovation diffusion

Second, using the criteria for the transfer of hardware technology to represent factors in the spread of social technology, Evans and Sims (unpublished paper) borrowed from Rogers (1983) to consider five factors of innovation diffusion: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Relative advantage indicates that the change is perceived as superior to the current way of doing things. There is a generally positive perception of teams, but other factors such as fear of appearing old-fashioned or power-hungry are equally motivating for managers.

Compatibility is the extent to which potential adopters of a new technology perceive the innovation to be consistent with their values, prior approaches, and needs. Proper implementation of SMWTs typically requires a major shift in management philosophy, so we might expect some resistance to this social technology. Some managers will resist the idea of teams, because they perceive the possibility of downsizing; only a few of them champion teams to the extent that they can say, "I will have reached my goal, when I have worked myself out of a job."

Complexity of a new technology reduces the likelihood of adoption (Rogers, 1983). This may also be exacerbated by the confusion and ambiguity that arises when teams are poorly implemented due to lack of management understanding. Managers may have a tendency to perceive the teams in an overly simplistic way; unless they have experienced teams directly, their "gut" understanding will probably be a mere caricature of what teams really are about.

Trialability is the degree to which a person can experiment with the new technology in a limited way (Rogers, 1983). Many organizations have used pilot teams as a way of becoming familiar with the redesign before rolling teams out to the whole organization. However, such experiments have not always been successful. First, if the pilot team(s) works, the concept may spread through the rest of the organization through the informal channels resulting in demands from other employees that they also be given such an opportunity. Second, a pilot team is typically isolated and hence does not reflect the complexities of transforming an entire system of work groups into teams. Hence the "experiment" will not have provided lessons for guiding the more complex systemic changes.

Observability seems to mean public visibility (Rogers, 1983). Some companies, notably Procter and Gamble, have treated information about their use of teams as proprietary ­ an industrial secret. Consulting companies often do the same thing. Hence, the spread of teams may have been hindered by secrecy. In the 1990's that has been less of an issue because of the upsurge in publications by researchers, consultants, and managers.

Path dependence

Third, the spread of teams may have been subject to the QWERTY problem: path dependence. QWERTY represents the arrangement of keys on a typewriter or keyboard. That series of letters is the string, from left to right, that appears beneath the number keys 1 to 6. It is a convenient way of naming the dominant keyboard arrangement used in the typing of documents in theEnglish language, a probably for most of the Latin-based languages. About 60 years ago, a different keyboard arrangement was recommended by Professor August Dvorak and named after him. He claimed that the QWERTY arrangement was created for the original typewriters of a century ago in orderto deliberately slow down typists, because the keys on old typewriterstended to jam when struck in too rapid a succession. Dvorak claimed that his keyboard arrangement was based on scientific research and resulted in significant improvements in performance, such as doubling thespeed of the typist, reducing errors to a small percent of the usual amount,and changing the position and motion of the hands and fingers sofatigue and muscle pain were reduced. There are web sites (e.g., WWW.MIT.EDU:8001/JCB/DVORAK/INDEX.HTML) that report all of this information and also offer DVORAK keyboards for sale, and the concept of changing from QWERTY to DVORAK keyboards gets addressed in articles a few times every year (e.g., see Discovery Magazine's April, 1997 issue).

A recent issue of the Wall Street Journal (Gomes, 1998) contained an article describing QWERTY to DVORAK conversion of keyboards, but the author, Lee Gomes, only used the article to illustrate a larger issue: path dependence. Gomes described the work of Paul David of Stanford University in the 1980's in developing the concept of path dependence as a way of explaining how superior technological solutions were sometimes not adopted, even in market economies, where competition should have enabled them to dominate less superior solutions. The victory of VHS video tape over BETA and of the MS-DOS operating system over Macintosh were given as other examples of path dependence, which means that once you start down a particular path, it is difficult to change to another way, even if the other way has some demonstrable benefits. Economists suggested that such flaws in the system might occur where monopolies or near-monopolies were operating in high tech fields.

Gomes' (1998) article goes on to describe how the path dependence theory has been recently challenged by other economists. Stan Liebowitz at the University of Texas at Dallas and Stephen E. Margolis of North Carolina StateUniversity have challenged the validity of the path dependence theory by challenging the validity of the examples it is based on, such as QWERTY, VHS, and MS-DOS. They argue that the benefits of the tools that lost the competitions were not really significant, so evidence that people get locked into bad technology is weak (they did not discuss alchemy, astrology, etc.). The benefits of working in teams are not as obvious as they need to be to upper level managers or union leaders. Research needs to be done on such issues as return on investment, to provide "bottom line" types of arguments for such decision makers.

Will teams continue to spread?

Yes! The trend identified by Lawler et al., (1995) will continue within the US There is evidence of an awakening to the value of teams in Europe, as indicated by the launching of two work teams conferences in the UK. within the past three years. A form of teams has been present in the Pacific Rim countries for some time in both Japanese companies and in US multinational companies. Australia seems alive with team activity.

The reasons given above explain some of the spread of teams, within countries, within corporations, and across the globe. But the two primary reasons that will fuel the spread of teams in the work place are the competitive advantage they bring to an organization and the way they improve the quality of work life. Entrepreneurial collaboration with a strong sense of ownership will generate remarkable results reflected in the "bottom line," and that kind of work environment will magnify the sense of contribution and meaning that people gain from work; teams can do that.