Self-Managed Teams

In the last byte, we looked at the concept of Dialectic Inquiry and Quality Circles as Group Decision Making techniques. In today's byte, we look at Self-Managed Teams in a bit more detail.

We have discussed about Self-Managed Team, however in the context of comparing it with Quality Circles and Quality Teams  we would need to note that the self-managed teams are more broad focused and do not limit themselves to quality or related production problems. The decisions self-managed teams do could also include work scheduling, job assignments, staffing etc - all these were once reserved only for the managers. Another difference is that these self managed teams have a delegated authority, unlike quality-circles which have a predominantly advisory role.

There is however a risk of falling trap to the issues of becoming a cohesive group - groupthink issues could arise. So the key to break this is by encouraging and welcoming dissent among members. This helps break down complacency and sent in motion a process the ability to make better decisions - methods like dialectic inquiry or devil's advocacy would be really useful here.