The development cycle you hear most in America is, "Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing." In the Netherlands, it's: "Job Enlargement, Job Enrichment, Co-operation, and High Performance," with performance defined as problem-solving. Two Dutch professors, Ben Kuipers and Marco de Witte, studied 37 empowered teams at a Volvo plant in Sweden, using surveys spaced seven months apart. They found that "the teams seemed to develop (all four stages) at the same time and in no specific order. We believe that it is more appropriate to refer to them as dimensions…"
That said, development in the four areas (combined) explained 34.5% of quality improvement between the two surveys. The combination did not affect job satisfaction, but workers cross-trained to do their colleagues' jobs over that period ("Job Enlargement") were more satisfied. Kuipers and de Witte also analyzed the first set of surveys to look at the effect of relative levels of team development (comparing teams in a "snapshot" of time instead of changes between times). Again, teams with the highest levels of job enlargement and cooperation met their schedules better and were more productive than those with less. Job enlargement was related to job satisfaction, and both it and "Job Enrichment"—what U.S. researchers call "empowerment" or job control—were related to having greater commitment to the company (what Volvo terms "involvoment!").
Source: Kuipers, B., and M. de Witte (05), "Teamwork: A Case Study on Development and Performance," International Journal of Human Resource Management 16(2):185.
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© 2009 by Jim Morgan. All rights reserved.