Self-Management and Leadership
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A concurrent engineering design process requires employees in each aspect of the process to work in tightly integrated relationships. As a result, the product development structures of the traditional sequential design process have to be reorganized into collaborative, multidisciplinary teams. Trygg (1993) reported that of the three generic elements of concurrent engineering (computer integration, analytical methods and tools, and multifunctional teams), multifunctional team work was the most consistently used element in successful concurrent engineering projects.

Study Outline

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between team success in concurrent engineering design teams and the influence of leadership and self-management. The concept of team success was based on Hackman's (1987) approach which defines success in terms of task performance, team development, and professional development. A successful team must complete its task in an effective manner, the team members should function well together, and working on the team should be a professional benefit to the team members.

Method

A survey was developed to measure employees' perceptions and beliefs about team work in their organizations. The survey examined perceived success of team work on the project, team members' beliefs about the role of leadership and self-management, as well as the influence of organizational factors which promote and support team work. These variables were measured with a thirty item survey which asked participants to rate how much they agreed or disagreed to statements about the topics.

The data was collected as part of two larger studies. Surveys were collected from a large concurrent engineering team that was part of an investigation of three R&D corporations in California which were exploring the benefit of self-managing teams. The second source of data was from a study that was conducted as part of the Intelligent Manufacturing System's Global Concurrent Engineering Test Case and supported by the National Science Foundation . A total of 297 surveys from 49 CE teams in 22 companies (and seven countries) were analyzed.

Results

Success of Teams

The success of team work was defined in terms of task performance, team development, and professional development. The results are reported in Table 1. On two of the three indicators of team success, team members believed their concurrent engineering teams were successful. Most team members believed that team work was an effective way to accomplish the task they were given. Team members enjoyed working in their teams and looked forward to working on teams in the future. The only negative finding on the team success measure was the professional development dimension. While team members believed that they were developing new skills, they did not believe that their participation in concurrent engineering teams was directly linked to their careers in the organization.


Statistical analysis of these ratings showed that they were highly correlated, and a composite measure of team success was created. As expected, all six of the questions in Table 1 significantly related to this composite measure (with all of correlations greater than .56). This global measure of team success was used to analyze the other factors in the survey.

Self-Management and Leadership

Table 2 summarizes the team members belief about self-management and leadership in their teams, and the relationship between these factors and the team members' overall evaluation of team success.


Three-quarters of the team members believed that it was up to the team to regulate it's own behavior, but over half the team members indicated that the team leader retained control over most major decisions. When leadership was evaluated, over 60% of the team members believed their team possessed good leadership which was there to help facilitate the team's interactions and give consultation and advice. Although leadership proved to be very important for the perceived success of CE design teams (r=.66, p<.01), self-management was only weakly related (r=.22, p<.01).

Discussion

While most team members believed that some aspects of self-management constituted an important ingredient in their teams, self-management was not an important factor in predicting overall team success. One of the problems with self-managing teams is that there are many leadership functions which are hard to displace with team work. The leader of a team handles administrative issues, sets the agenda and facilitates the team's interactions, provides direction and goals, manages the team's external relations, handles personnel matters like performance evaluations and rewards, and deals with personnel problems.

In theory, all of these functions can be replaced through self-management. However, self-management is very time consuming and necessitates a focus on team process which requires a great deal of skill by all members of the team. Many professionals would rather spend more time in design activities than in team process activities. In addition, the temporary nature of these project teams means that team building activities must be performed for each project.

SMT can also be a very slow process in the fast paced and pressured environment of concurrent engineering where external relations and personnel issues can be very complicated. For example, CE teams often include many part time members and there is a relatively high degree of turnover due to the multi-functional nature of the task. A continuous need for basic SMT training is very time consuming while the team is being pressed by its commitments to other CE teams working on different aspects of the project.

It is likely that there is no one best way to manage CE teams. It appears that some of the best CE teams will use some SMT techniques, e.g. consensus decision making, during the early phases of the project to create confidence and clear direction for the product specifications. Once trust, confidence, and product specification have been achieved, the teams evolve their management into a more traditional team leader style which is more efficient in handling employee turnover, partial participation, and the complexities of the CE task execution.

REFERENCES

Hackman, R. (1986). The psychology of self-management in organizations. In M. Pallak & R. Perloff (Eds.), Psychology and Work. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Assn.

Hackman, R. (1987). The design of work teams. In J. Lorsch (ed.), Handbook of
Organizational Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Hackman, R. (ed.) (1990). Groups That Work (and Those That Don't). San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.

Trygg, L. Concurrent engineering practices in selected Swedish companies: A movement or an activity of the few? Journal of Product Innovation Management, 10, 403-415
(1993).

Wellins, R. & George, J. (1991). The key to self-directed teams. Training and Development
Journal, April, 26-31.

Winner, R., et al. The role of concurrent engineering in weapons system acquisition. IDA
Report R-338. Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analysis, 1988.

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