Management confronts many different organizational problems daily. Examples are production systems that are not manufacturing products at the desired levels of quality, workers who appear to be listless and uninvolved, and managers who are basing their decisions on inaccurate information.

For assistance in solving such formidable problems, management commonly establishes special teams. A team set up to help eliminate a specified problem within the organization is called a problem-solving team.30 The typical problem-solving team has 5 to 12 members and is formed to discuss ways to improve quality in all phases of the organization, to make organizational processes more efficient, or to improve the overall work environment.31

After the problem-solving team reaches a consensus, it makes recommendations to management about how to deal with the specified problem. Management may respond to the team’s recommendations by implementing them in their entirety, by modifying and then implementing them, or by requesting further information to assess them. Once the problem that management asked the problem-solving team to address has been solved, the team is generally disbanded.

The self-managed team, sometimes called a self-managed work group or a self-directed team, is a team that plans, organizes, influences, and controls its own work situation with only minimal intervention and direction from management.34 This creative team design involves a highly integrated group of several skilled individuals who are cross-trained and have the responsibility and authority to perform a specified activity.

Activities typically carried out by management in a traditional work setting—creating work schedules, establishing work pace and breaks, developing vacation schedules, evaluating performance, determining the level of salary increases and rewards received by individual workers, and ordering materials to be used in the production process—are instead carried out by members of the self-managed team. Generally responsible for whole tasks as opposed to “parts” of a job, the self-managed team is an important way of structuring, managing, and rewarding work.35 Because these teams require only minimum management attention, they free managers to pursue other management activities such as strategic planning.

Reports of successful self-managed work teams are plentiful.36 These teams are growing in popularity because today’s business environment seems to require such work teams to solve complex problems independently, because American workers have come to expect more freedom in the workplace, and because the speed of technological change demands that employees be able to adapt quickly. Recent studies seem to suggest that the collective behavior of a self-managed team can make it more effective than the individual efforts of its team members.37

Not all self-managed teams are successful, however. To ensure the success of a self-managed team, the manager should carefully select and properly train its members.38

A cross-functional team is a work team composed of people from different functional areas of the organization—marketing, finance, human resources, and operations, for example—who are all focused on a specified objective.39 Cross-functional teams may or may not be self-managed, although self-managed teams are generally cross-functional. Because cross-functional team members are from different departments within the organization, the team possesses the expertise to coordinate all the department activities within the organization that affect its own work.40

Some examples of cross-functional teams are teams established to choose and implement new technologies throughout an organization, teams formed to improve marketing effectiveness within the organization, and teams established to control product costs.41

This section discussed three types of teams that exist in organizations: problem-solving, self-directed, and cross-functional. It should be noted here that managers can establish various combinations of these three types of teams. Figure 15.6 illustrates some possible combinations that managers could create. For example, a in the figure represents a team that is problem solving, self-directed, and cross-functional, and b represents one that is problem solving but neither cross-functional nor self-directed. Before establishing a team, managers should carefully study their own unique organizational situation and then set up the type of team that best suits that situation.