Executive Summary

A new business environment is driving a deeper commitment to team building. Businesses today must compete in a worldwide arena in which information and technologies are widely distributed and rapidly applied to new products and services.  The rapid innovation required to meet these competitive pressures dictates a more effective approach to idea generation and development.  While businesses are coping with challenges of this new “fast-paced era”, they must also be dealing with the unceasing demands for higher productivity, improved service and better quality.   These combined demands necessitate a greater degree of coordination and communication among employees  — levels that can only be achieved through empowered, quality teamwork.    

The purpose of this report is to examine the notion of teamwork.   It focuses on the various categories of team, the benefits of empowered team and the practices of teamwork in many successful organizations today.  General Electric's Aircraft Engine, Chrysler Corporation, 3M, Marque Inc. and McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. are examples discussed in this report.  The synergy resulting from properly structured organization and empowered team is incredible.

As many organizations begin restructuring their corporate cultures with empowered employee teams, employees across the organization will be involved in the decision-making process. Truly empowered employee teams can therefore assist organizations to improve customer satisfaction, increase employee’s productivity and morale, lower costs and drive profit.


What is Empowered Team?

There are many definitions of team documented in the literature.  What team is or does, how it is structured, how team members differ from traditional employees, what limitations are placed on team, and how team members will be held accountable can vary greatly from one organization to another.  In essence, empowered team is self-sufficient group of people working together with specific goals.  They have the corporate authority, experience, responsibility and skills to enact their own decisions for the organization.  The highest level of management stabilizes the team's direction, which drives the empowerment process by connecting it to the organization's business needs and metrics. Management focuses on developing employees and supporting the organizational goals.  Often times, employees’ jobs are refined and broadened.  The object is to maximize the use of everyone's talents within the organization.  

Although most empowered teams have common features but not all of them share a common structure or objective.  Empowered teams can fall into three categories: Project Team, Total Customer Satisfaction Team and Work Unit Team.   Project Team is cross- functional work team handling a project for a given time period.  It is usually comprised of employees from engineering, finance, management, manufacturing and marketing departments.  An example would be a new product development team.  The second category of empowered team is Total Customer Satisfaction team.  This team addresses customer and business issues. They work from the premise that creativities, intelligences and perspectives exist in all employees, not just among managers. Not only can employees do more than their daily assignments but are also capable of refining all the organization's products and processes.   The last category of empowered team is Work Unit Team.  Members of this team works together on a day-to-day basis and focuses in on the output of the organization.

Join now!

Benefits Associated with Empowered Team

The key element to any successful organization is, first and foremost, its employees. There is no substitute for a knowledgeable and productive workforce. Carefully managing the workforce (i.e. creating empowered teams - people working with all the direct information, power, recognition, reward and training they need to satisfy their customers and meet the company's business goals) is one way of differentiating itself from the competitors.  The most common benefits of empowered teams include creating a more customer-focused culture, enhancing communication within the organization, generating creative ideas, increasing organizational adaptability and flexibility and raising ...

This is a preview of the whole essay