Team responsibility structure and team performance

Abstract

The purpose is to analyse the impact of team responsibility (the division of job regulation tasks between team leader and team members) on team performance. It bases an analysis on 36 case studies in The Netherlands which are known to have implemented team-based work. The case studies were executed in 1997 by means of face-to-face interviews with HRM staff and line management. It concludes from the analyses that two different types of team responsibility prevail. In a``hierarchical team'' team leaders take responsibility for decisions concerning work preparation, support and control, while in the``shared-responsibility team'' decisions are taken by the team members themselves. The analyses show that``sharedresponsibility teams'' are thought to contribute more substantially to team performance outcomes than``hierarchical teams''. The analysis helped gain a better understanding of the relationship between HRM and organisation performance, as it is viewed in the``human resource-based view of the firm''. Section 1. Introduction Considering its prominent place in the prevailing organisational discourse, team-based work has proven to be a favourite formula for organisational redesign. It is a promising concept which offers autonomy, responsibility and job enrichment in order to meet the aspirations of the employees. At the same time, team-based work is believed to enhance performance outcomes such as productivity and quality, on both the team and the organisation level. Hence, management fashions such as business process re-engineering, lean production, the modern socio-technical approach and human resources management (HRM), all embrace the core principles of team-based work (

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From an Intrateam to an Interteam Perspective of Effectiveness: The Role of Interdependence and Boundary Activities

“…This way, teams can maximize the organization's resources because each team's unique resources flow across team boundaries so they can be used by their counterpart teams (Doorewaard, Van Hootegem, & Huys, 2002;Michalisin, Karau, & Tangpong, 2004). For example, organizational learning research emphasizes that accumulating organizational knowledge clearly depends on flow of resources, such as information across team boundaries (Sole & Edmondson, 2002).…”

I will follow (when I need to)

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