According to the ACAS (the Arbitration, Conciliation and Advisory Service), teams within organisations have existed for many years and there are very little of these who have not used the term at one point.

Michelle Armit Organisational Behaviour Coursework 21/03/03

“If team working is implemented as a coordinated and fully supported programme it can be the most cost-effective method of expediting lasting improvement within an organisation.” (1)

“It is a myth that teams always come up with a better solution than one individual working alone.” (2)

A team is a group of people coming together to cooperate with each other. This is to reach a shared goal or task for which they hold themselves equally accountable. The members within a team are extremely dedicated to each other's personal growth and success.

“Teams occur when a number of people have a common goal and recognise that their personal success is dependant on the success of others. They are all interdependent. In practice, this means that in most teams people will contribute individual skills many of which will be different....”. (3)

Working together as a team within an organisation provides many benefits for the organisation, this includes increased employee motivation and higher levels of production. Team members do not only cooperate in every feature of their tasks and goals, they also share in management functions, such as planning, assessing the team's performance, developing their own approaches to manage change, organising, establishing performance goals, and protecting their own resources. Team working has been productively operated in a variety of different industries varying from mobile-phones manufacturers to banking and financial institutions. The Institute for Employee Studies Director, Richard Pearson explains,

“Cross-functional teams bring together diverse talents, and encourage thinking outside the box. They have enormous potential for increasing the knowledge base of organisations. They can be the very coalface of organisational learning, as well as enhancing the skills and abilities of individuals.” (4)

Frederick W Taylor, the founder of scientific management believed that employees worked for one reason only, money. He understood that the more they were paid, the more work they would produce. Taylor designed a number of principles to guide management, they can be summarised in a few points, each employees work is determined by a true science, selecting, training and developing the employees scientifically, in order to ensure employees perform their work in the arranged method, co operation is a key factor and finally, the work and responsibilities of employees needs to be divided in an appropriate way. He determined the most efficient way to carry out repetitive tasks and then encouraged workers with a scheme of wage incentives. The fundamental assumption was that

(1) www.saferpak.com

(2) ‘Bringing out the best in people’, Aubrey C Daniels

(3) Crainer, S.Key Management Ideas: Thinkers that changed the management world, third edition, Financial Times Prentice Hall (1998). P.237

(4) www.employment-studies.co.uk

managers understood the work better than workers, who were basically lazy and could be motivated only by money. He believed employees were important production

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(3) Crainer, S.Key Management Ideas: Thinkers that changed the management world, third edition, Financial Times Prentice Hall (1998). P.237

(4) www.employment-studies.co.uk

managers understood the work better than workers, who were basically lazy and could be motivated only by money. He believed employees were important production

tools, like machinery. By the 1990s, people began to realise that the quality of how they lived their lives was much more important than the work they produced. Therefore Taylor’s theory worked but only for a while. Taylor’s faith in his technique was so dedicated; he would not accept management’s interfering behaviour so in the end his services were disposed of. As efficiency improved, fewer workers were needed for specific tasks. Managers tended to reduce the size of wage incentive and layoffs became common. At that point, the model began to fail, as workers started to demand job security over temporary and minor wage increases. In the early 1900s, the American Watertown Arsenal organisation began to use Taylor’s scientific management approach within the business. This instantly led to many strikes by the employees; they were left feeling resentful and became very aggressive towards management. Even in today’s society scientific management remains in practice, but recent studies reveal it is becoming recognised as a road to the failure of businesses. Taylor also introduced the ides of ‘functional foremanship’; this was where workers would be responsible at the same time for eight various, professional first-line supervisors. The eight supervisors were separated into two groups; those who would plan and those who would perform. The method led to great confusion and conflict over co-ordination, whose role was whose and unity of command. The idea was not very well liked and was not used very much in practice. One of the main problems with Frederick Taylor’s theory was that he did not take into consideration the importance of the employee’s personal feelings and the desire for group and teamwork. As management recognised this need, human relations became the management device used to manage the new work ethic.

Between 1924 and 1932 there were a serious of experiments carried out at the Western Electric Company in America. These were called the Hawthorn experiments and one of the many people who wrote about them was Elton Mayo. He was influenced greatly by Taylor. The Human Relations movement was a consequence of a significant effort by government, business, and unions to assist dramatic developments in manufacturing with new forms of work organisation. With the fall down of these efforts at worker representation through combined formation (unions, shop committees and works councils) the spotlight changed to the individual employee and to how to improve isolation at work. The original research plan was to study the effects of physical conditions for example, light, noise, and temperature on productivity. But what the researchers found was that the productivity was greatly influenced by the social conditions within the workplace. Numbers of experiments were carried out on a group of six women, in result of these experiments; the girls became a team and began working together and cooperating well with each other. It made the girls feel less pressurised then before therefore the quality of their work began to improve.

This became known as the Hawthorn Effect. Mayo discovered that the main reason for improved performance was that the girls were socialising. When the women were singled out from the rest of the factory workers, it raised their self-esteem. They were authorised to have a friendly relationship with their supervisor and this improved their happiness at work, when he discussed changes in advance with them, they felt like part of a team. Mayo began to realise that productivity would continue to rise gradually even when he cut out breaks and returned the women to longer working hours. This was due to the women exercising a freedom they did not have on the factory floor and had formed a social atmosphere that also included the observer who tracked their productivity. He realised that workplaces are social environments and this, not only money, motivates the employees. The single most important discovery of the Hawthorn experiments was that workers had a strong need to co-operate and communicate with fellow workers. In Mayo’s words,

“...The eager human desire for co operative activity still persists in the ordinary person and can be utilised by intelligent and straightforward management.” (5)

In 1954, the Human Relation approach led psychologist, Abraham Maslow to develop a hierarchy of human needs. It was in the form of a triangle with the most important needs of a human being at the bottom. The third level was; social needs, they included the importance of acceptance by members of the family, individuals and as Mayo discovered, groups.

The Ford Motor Company is a very wealthy company with over 400,000 employees across the world. It owns Hertz, the largest car rental company in the world. During the 1980s, it took the Ford Motor Company up to five years to design a new model this obviously was quite slow. Designers and engineers worked on the model condition without concerning other parties and then presented specifications to manufacturers but these specifications were inflexible. Manufacturers were expected to do all the work and if a problem was to arise at a manufacturing stage, designers and engineers would be again be included to correct the problem, which could have been acknowledged during the designing stage. Consequently, this happened to be too costly and resulted in some models never being manufactured due to the delays and length of time taken up. In the end the Ford Motor Company become aware that there was a problem, which was unfavourably disturbing its development and improvement, basically, they needed a change. This resulted in the company developing work teams, the teams comprised of planners, designers, manufacturers, suppliers, sales people and so on. The initial problems were now solved.

The teams began to investigate other companies who designed cars such as Audi, BMW, and Toyota using them to advance their own products. They also began to involve customers, by carrying out various tests. Ford gained great knowledge of the needs and desires of customers through many methods of market research. Using this teamwork method the teams made decisions and personal development began to arise in result of the teamwork. Stew Friedman who was a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, He was well known in human-resources circles as a principal thinker on work-life issues, in 1991 Friedman had produced a leadership program. The program related to Friedman's training as an organisational psychologist and to the ideas of Tichy and other professors at the University of Michigan, where he had studied in the 1980s. Team development and

(5) Notes on Mayo provided by George Ferguson, Business Management Lecturer

personal growth were combined. This has improved the effectiveness and efficiency in the company for many years and is one of the reasons for the organisations great success over the years.

It is not only companies who can benefit from using teamwork within their organisation. The NHS has expanded a great deal due to groups working together as a team. This year, the 'Clinical Governance Large Group Work' team is distributing skills and intelligence by operating with other Clinical Governance Support Team programmes. There is a persisting request for events that would bring people together who know about, care about, deliver and use health services in order for them to connect with each other, therefore the process of advancing patient care will be done more rapidly. Another development in the functioning of clinical governance is a Clinical Governance Support Team programme for inefficiently operating NHS teams. This programme applied learning from the airline industry to expand effective team working therefore improving patient safety and care. Specialist team coaches work to improve the skills necessary for combined, consistent teamwork within and across NHS organisations. The introduction of clinical governance was sustained by the appointment of a ‘National Director of Clinical Governance’ and the expansion of the (CGST). A range of original and appealing development programmes for multidisciplinary teams and NHS organisations throughout England have been set up. The work of the CGST has extended considerably to meet the constant growth requirement for support as clinical teams and ‘Trust Board’ teams employ clinical governance in their organisations.

In North and East Devon, and East Suffolk Mental Health, entire health community programmes have resulted in teams of health professionals from general practices coming together. Hospitals and their wider communities employ service progression for patients and staff in their regional areas. Altogether, there are thirty-five clinical teams who are concerned in this health community programme in England. The main Clinical Governance Development Programme is for supporting multidisciplinary teams for example,

“An elderly services team may be made up of a consultant, a nurse, an occupational therapist and a ward manager from a NHS hospital.” (6)

In recent years, there have been a number of Government proposals, which have highlighted the significance of team working in primary health care working to make the most of quality and to meet patients' needs and expectations. Also, recently a forum of team working in primary care was assembled including organisations such as the National Pharmaceutical Association and the British Medical Association. The forum constructed a document that brought together evidence to defend team working in the provision of health care, which was valuable to patients and team members. It draws attention to and examines features that advance or reduce team working, supplying examples of team accomplishments that have been successful in defeating obstruction and barriers so they could achieve shared goals for patients.

Within organisations, significant issues generally require teams. Matters such

(6) www.doh.gov.uk

as quality enhancement, empowerment, organisational development, and change all depend on the contributions from the work teams. Appendix 1 provides examples of organisations that have encountered team success within their company. Many organisations see team working as the most effective method for increasing productivity so therefore a great deal of time and effort is spent on developing and furthering team work. Teams supply social and controlled encouragement for their members, and can increase improvement and originality as ideas are considered and adapted within the team. Frederick Taylor’s scientific management theory has proved not to work in practice but was not completely unsuccessful. It aided Elton Mayo to

develop his experiments and produce his theory of teamwork efficiency within organisations. Furthermore, Abraham Maslow developed his hierarchy of needs from both of these theorists. The three men contributed to the common knowledge within work places today, that teamwork is more effective and efficient than an individual working alone. This has been proved in many organisations is continuing to be the success of many companies and businesses. Teams do not, however, appear out of no where, in order for an organisation to make team working effective, a great deal of thought and effort has to done by management. This is why there have been ‘team development’ interventions such as “Outward Bound” weekends and team events out with the workplace. These are used a great deal by organisations such as HSBC, Barclays Bank and British Telecom. They are recognised as a method of encouraging team members to share concerns and issues in order to develop more effective ways in the workplace. To summarise, organisations can and have used work teams to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their company. In the words of Miller Consulting Group of Atlanta,

“Every company which has succeeded in becoming the world-class standard of quality in its field has organised into teams to enable employees to take greater responsibility for their own work.” (7)