Rl Wolfe Case Study Essay

Self Directed Teams are made up of employees that have very little input from management. Fedex created self directed teams which were successful in resolving technical issues with lost packages and errors in billing. Consequently these teams were able to save the company millions of dollars. They were successful because company founder and CEO Fred Smith recognized teams with the “Circle of Excellence of Award” each month. (Lussier, R.N. and Achua, C.F. 2013 page 311 and

Being inspired by the idea of Self-Directed Team (SDT), Amasi, director at RL Wolfe, decided to apply SDT in the new plant of RL Wolfe in Corpus Christi. To implement this idea, Amasi and his team introduced change in 2 main areas including job definition and team organization. This essay is going to analyze the change implementation in these 2 domains to diagnosis underlying problems and propose recommendations to improve the transformation in the Corpus Christi plants.

Part of being a manager for a company is managing teams. These teams can be created for many different reasons and can have various goals put upon them. Companies want managers that are capable of constructing teams that can effectively meet goals and set standards. The four types of work teams most commonly found in organizations are: problem-solving, self-managed, cross-functional, and virtual. In completing the simulation for this course, I will use cross-functional work teams as a foundation for my investigation of effective team management.

Executives refer to business as a team sport for a variety of reasons. First, many business organizational structures arrange departments either in cross specialty teams or task oriented teams based on operational design and expected outcomes. These teams are designed with members who are assigned roles that increase overall team productivity. The team members bring talents, knowledge and a skill set that uniquely contributes to collective intelligence and resourcefulness. Through collaboration and team work, Successful teams achieve synergy, or “exceeds the sum of each individual’s contribution”.

Ivancevich, Konopaske and Matteson (2008) mirror these views by holding on to the concept that the use of team work in the organization forcefully follows the structured schema of identifying true leaders within the organizational structure, facilitating the emotional commitment of such leaders and evaluating the progress of the teams by using a mix of people from different levels and departments in the organization. The efficiency of the coalition leads to improved performance for both short term and long-term goals.

Upon reviewing the implementation of Self-Directed Teams (SDT) at the newly acquired plant in Corpus Christi, Texas I have come to a conclusion that we need to redefine each team and revamp the roles and responsibilities of the team members that comprise each team.

Some of the characteristics in establishing self-directed, high-performing teams are Joint Responsibility, Interdependence, Empowerment, and Common Goal (Chron 2017). All of the team members on successful self-directed, high-performing teams are assigned responsibilities. This makes the team members feel like they are important to the success of the project. As the project

When the DOC’s individuals are viewing their goals as supporting the goals of the organization, the team’s interdependence has been recognized as reciprocally supporting. The DOC teams are functional groups due to improved communications, productivity through brainstorming and information gathering abilities, which creatively solves problems by using analytical steps (Staggers, Garcia, & Nagelhout, 2008). While the process of teamwork may be a learned behavior, support for the team must be processed through several individual stages. These stages are necessary milestones that build synergized teams that work toward a common goals of the team and organization. The SOA, DOC’s team building tactics have inadvertently and unexpectedly progressed through the five stages of Cog’s Ladder. While the technical name may be alluding the DOC, the success of their teams is measurable. The most recent and successfully measurable DOC team may be analyzed and compared to Cog’s

Manz, C. C., & Neck, C. P. (1995). Teamthink: Beyond the groupthink syndrome in self-managing work teams. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 10(1), 7. Retrieved from https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libraryresources.c olumbiasouthern.edu/docview/215865256?accountid=33337

The Corpus Christi Experiment, initiated by Mr. John Amasi (Director of Production and Engineering) at RL Wolfe in 2004, was an attempt to employ the Self-directed teams at the newly acquired Plastic Pipe Manufacturing Plant in Corpus Christi, TX. Self-directed team implementation has produced a lot of positives for the Corpus Christi plant such as higher design capacity achieved, job satisfaction among workers, lower turnover rates. After 3 years of implementation of Self-directed teams in Corpus Christi plant, 80% to 82% design capacity was met. RL Wolfe’s other two plants with traditional teams are able to meet the 65%-70% of design capacity. Since all the other conditions viz. Raw Material availability,

In 2004, John Amasi introduced the self-directed teams in plant. He found the scope for further improvement in job definition, hiring, teal set up and responsibilities and the role of the coordinator avenues (Garvin & Collins, 2009).

Cheeseburger in Paradise also uses self-directed teams because there are people from various departments-so to speak coming together as one. The hostess, servers, cooks, table bussers, and managers all come together as one. If the company doesn’t want to work together as a team, self-directed teams can have their disadvantages. So many different people working together may not get along, also they may not want to help out others in different departments because it does not benefit them directly. The success of a high-performance team follows the five stages of team development: “Forming-getting to know the team members and the team; Storming-teams struggle to establish roles, norms, and goals; Norming-roles, norms, and goals are established; Performing-team members have learned to efficiently coordinate activities, resolve conflicts, and work together with a high level of trust; Adjourning-the team is about to disband and team members shift their focus from a task to a relationship focus (Warrick, 2014). At Cheeseburger in Paradise, we had daily meetings before we opened the

The issue of team self-management is one of great interest in today’s complex environment, it seems many businesses are restructuring themselves in an attempt to “modernize” and stay relevant. Some of the most successful organizations in modern times were nothing more than an idea a decade or two ago, with names like Facebook and Zappos. Part of this successful “startup culture” includes decentralization of decision-making, often leading to a more flexible and employee friendly work environment. More traditional organizations are taking note of this trend and studying it or implementing it themselves.

The self-directed work team is an autonomous work unit capable of self-management. Such team has little need for direct supervision from managers; rather, the manager’s role is to meet the need of the team through the provision of resources, training and encouragement (Douglas & Gardner, 2004). The team is typically comprised of 5 to 15 members who are responsible for performing and managing all or most aspect of a set of interdependent work tasks (Yeatts and Hyten, 1998). In order to overcome the competitive challenge for production efficiency and effectiveness, organizations have focused on

Accordingly, the concept of self-managed work teams has increasingly been – in today’s globally competitive environment – receiving attention from both academics and organisations as a promising new tool in management (Manz 1992; Druskat & Wheeler 2004). The concept of self-managed work teams describes the set of