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Organizations are facing stiff competition in the ever‐changing global market‐place and are sure to face increasing battles in the future. To position themselves for success in the coming decade, many organizations are making the transition to an empowered workforce. In an empowering environment, those closest to the job are given the responsibility to make decisions regarding their own work, and many times, their own customers. Implementing self‐directed teams is a step towards achieving an empowered culture. Details the five necessary steps for successful team implementation including: the six‐step process for designing teams, adopting team selection systems, addressing new training needs, initiating leadership transitions and changing roles, and rewarding team rather than individual performance.

So your organization needs leaders. Not just any leaders, but good, effective leaders who get the best out of your people, and who consistently get results. Well, what organization doesn’t? The need to attract and develop people to lead programs, projects, policies and practices is a constant and vital requirement, and not just in the business world. Every administration which comprises a body of people charged with getting something done – whether a government, university, charity, army or a company – needs people with qualities and abilities which allow them to lead.

Riding on the coattails of TQM and reeengineering, teams seem to have become the organizational structure of choice. But is a team always the best choice for the job? What happens when teams fail? What is management's role in team success or failure?

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

This paper explores the theoretical implications of empowered self‐management as a teamwork design concept. It explores the multiple definitions of empowerment and self‐management that have been used in the design of work teams and it attempts to locate empowered self‐management within the relevant traditions of work design. The paper provides a critical appraisal of empowered self‐management as a team design concept arguing that its unique contribution to the work design literature, has been the development of concepts that focus upon task enlargement as the basis of enhanced role accountabilities within teams. Empowered self‐management as a team design concept has little to say about employee or group autonomy but in fact reflects the design of teams to provide for the normative self‐regulation of employees within management directed systems of control.

Employee evaluation and monitoring have been common in America since colonial times. With industrialization, employers have implemented increasingly creative ways to monitor employees. For example, in the early part of this century, Ford Motor Company employed investigators to enter employees' homes to verify that employees were not overly drinking and that their homes were clean

Corporate downsizing or restructuring has reached epidemic proportions and left many victims and survivors in its wake. Although some corporations are now finding that they have overdone downsizing or restructuring, these efforts to re‐engineer themselves were necessary for many of them. The issue here is not the need to change our work environment, but rather how we communicate those changes. Deals primarily with the problems that survivors of reorganization face and offers some communication‐oriented solutions.

To stay competitive on both local and global scales, companies have to respond rapidly to their customers and to the increasing role of information technology. One way of answering the demands that face today’s management, is to increase employees’ implication in the organization by empowering them. The shift from top to bottom authority to a team‐oriented organization is part of this process. Self‐directed teams (SDT) are a key element in making this shift work. In this paper, after a brief definition and description of this kind of team, we will focus on conflict management as an important factor for their success. Conflict and its mechanisms will first be developed, its consequences on group decision making will be studied at the SDTs level, and a set of conflict management alternatives will finally be presented.

The research objectives are to investigate the perception of work empowerment of quantity surveyors and to determine whether perceived work empowerment is an antecedent of commitment.

An exploratory study amongst quantity surveyors in four different types of construction industry organisations in Hong Kong is conducted. Data are collected by use of established questionnaires, yielding 136 valid responses.

Organisational commitment comprises dimensions of effectiveness and continuance. It is found that when the perception of work empowerment increases, organisational commitment increases accordingly. Work empowerment is related to affective commitment rather than continuance commitment. Professional qualification and nationality are positively correlated with both dimensions of organisational commitment. Chinese chartered quantity surveyors show more commitment to their organisations. Generally, male QS shows less continuance commitment and the longer the QS has worked for the organisation (particularly in consultancy firms), the less continuance commitment one has.

The regression analysis supports the relationship of commitment and work empowerment. Work empowerment enhances self‐efficacy and, through motivation and commitment, leads to increased performance and effectiveness.