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Self-managed Work Team

Self-managed work team is the group of employee who take on the responsibilities of the supervisor. The group performs all things by themselves. They make planning and scheduling of the work. Typically, self-managed teams are group of 10-15 employees who perform related or interdependent jobs. They select their own members and evaluate each other's performance. It increases productivity and satisfaction. However, the effectiveness of self-managed teams is situationally dependent. They have reduced the importance of supervisor position. Due to this reason, many companies in US, Europe, Japan are putting to their effort to developed self-managed team in their organizations. These teams are oneself-managed. No need to manage them from the upper level.

Merit: Members report high job satisfaction
Demerit: Higher absenteeism and turnover rates, don't seem to work well while downsizing.

Major Issues in Managing Work Teams
1. How does team facilitate the adoption of TQM (Total Quality Management)?
The TQM requires encouragement to employee by management to share ideas and implement improvements. Team provides the vehicle for employees to share ideas and to implement improvement. The issue is how to make the work teams effective for quality problem solving, especially in terms of size, ability, resources, mobilization etc.

2. What is the importance of workforce diversity on team performance?
The strongest case for diversity on work teams is when these teams are engaged in problem-solving and decision-making tasks. Diverse groups have more difficulty in working together and solving problem but this dissipate with time.

3. Increasing team effectiveness
An important issue is how to increase and maintain team effectiveness. For this, the following things should be taken into considerations. 
  • Prepare member to deal with the problem of maturity- remind them that they are not unique.
  • Offer refresher training
  • Offer advanced training
  • Encourage team to treat their development as a constant learning experience.

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