When a work group is turning into a self-directed work team (SDWT), the actions of a single individual can determine whether that team succeeds: the manager. Whether or not the manager can strike the right balance between giving enough guidance and not giving orders is critical to the team's success. To learn more about how managers handle the change, two researchers followed the progress of five teams in maintenance, customer service, and production for 18 months at a unionized 800-worker aluminum plant making the transition to SDWTs.
Team development goes through well-defined stages, and ideally managers will adjust their management techniques accordingly. Logic indicates that managers move away from giving orders and applying pressure ("hard" tactics) to suggesting and persuading ("soft" tactics). But that did not happen: on the whole, the team managers did not increase their use of soft tactics over time. They used hard tactics less often, but the researchers suggest this may be because the opportunity to use hard tactics goes down as power is transferred to the team.
Self-aware managers who were good at seeing themselves as others did and changing their own behaviors were more likely to increase their soft influence tactics.
Source: Douglas, C., and W. Gardner (04), "Transition to Self-Directed Work Teams: Implications of Transition Time and Self-Monitoring for Managers' Use of Influence Tactics," Journal of Organizational Behavior 25:47.
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© 2009 by Jim Morgan. All rights reserved.