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Making Teams Work Essay

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Making Teams Work

The importance of teams is becoming more and more apparent in today's dynamic business world. Increasingly managers are searching for a means to improve production and keep their organization competitive in the global market. A lot of these managers have turned to the team as a means for achieving this improvement. Quality circles were originally looked at to fulfill this role, however they are being phased out in favor of self-managed work teams. These teams are increasingly being used to solve many of today's organizations production problems and inefficiencies, and in the process are both badly failing and greatly succeeding. So the discussion of teams is a very important one to address. Managers should be …show more content…

Evidence of this apprehension could be interpreted from a study conducted by the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California. The Center conducted a survey of Fortune 1000 companies and found that 68% of them used self-managed work teams. However, only 10% of total workers are involved in such teams. (Dumaine) These results could suggest that most companies are still learning about work teams and are not ready to throw themselves into committing large portions of their workforce to work teams. As organizations and managers hear the success stories of Federal Express, IDS, and Ford, they want to reap the benefits of successful team implementation as well. However, they obviously want to steer clear of the possible problems and costs that unsuccessful team implementation can produce.

Although all teams require maintenance and costs, they can be fine-tuned to keep these costs to a minimum, which will also maximize the team's success. One way to do this is with planning. Failure to adequately plan and study for the team building process can get your very expensive team into trouble. This could lead to an unfavorable beginning for the team, which may sabotage the team in the long run and end up costing

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