Evidence-Based Recommendation 1

Give team members the ability to make their own decisions by creating a self-managing team will provide greater team effectiveness and productivity.  

A self-managed team can be defined as a small group or team whose members determine, plan, and manage their day-to-day activities and duties under reduced or no supervision. Giving a team the ability to make their own decisions has shown to create higher team effectiveness and productivity, especially in creative environments. One study by Vincent Rousseau and Caroline Aubé, titled Team Self-Managing Behaviors and Team Effectiveness: The Moderating Effect of Task Routineness, investigated the role of team members’ self-managing behaviors in regard to team performance, team viability, and team process improvement by conducting a controlled experiment. They hypothesized that team self-managing behaviors were positively related to team performance, team viability and team process improvement.  The sample consisted of 97 work teams (341 members and 97 immediate supervisors) drawn from a public safety organization. The selection of work teams to participate in the study was based on the following criteria that implied that members of a team (a) constituted a formal group in the organization; (b) had team goals to accomplish; (c) executed tasks that were connected to the mission of the organization; and (d) were interdependent in task accomplishment. In addition, team members had to have been working in their team for at least three months and immediate superiors had to have been responsible for their team for at least six months in order to ensure that participants were sufficiently knowledgeable of their team to provide representative data regarding their team. The data was obtained through survey questionnaires and hypotheses were tested through regression analysis with five control variables. Results showed that team self-managing behaviors were positively and significantly related to team performance (β = .23, p < .05), team viability (β = .25, p < .05), and team process improvement (β = .31, p < .01).

Source: Team Self-Managing Behavior and Team Effectiveness: The Moderating Effect of Task Routineness

Giving team members the ability to self-manage their own tasks and responsibilities were shown to affect positive team performance in this study. In Hard Facts, Dangerous, Half-Truths & Total Nonsense, Pfeffer and Sutton argue the importance of leaders to “figure out when, and how, to get out of the way” to encourage better performance in teams. By giving teams the ability to work without the constant feedback and questioning, teams are able to have and feel more responsibility for the work they provide. As Dan Ariely mentions in his talk titled Predictably Irrational: Basic Human Motivations, people are more motivated when they feel they have more responsibility and more to contribute.

In highly centralized organizations, sometimes a bottleneck effect can occur reducing efficiency.  A bottleneck effect occurs when all of the decisions run through the same individual, that individual cannot make decisions as quickly compared to if there is trust within the team.  By developing a decentralized organization in which teams are self-managed, can increase team productivity and effectiveness amongst that team.  There will be a filter placed on employee employee innovation and creativity if individuals are not empowered with the ability to make decisions.  Why should an employee try to think outside the box if the leader that has the ability to make the decision shuts him or her down?  As stated in How to be an Effective Leader, “Why should I,” the employee asks. “He is just going to do what he wants anyways.” In Self-Directed Teams: Definition, Advantages, and Disadvantages states “Self-directed team members are also likely to have a high level of job satisfaction, which can mean low absenteeism and turnover for the team”  Although there is no direct evidence of this, there is evidence that job satisfaction does lead to low absenteeism and turnover.  It can be implied that being part of a self-managed team will lead to higher job satisfaction.  

A potential weakness and limitation of the study mentioned above is that although the results pointed to a positive relationship between a self-managing team and team effectiveness, there is no indication of what exactly causes it. What are the benefits to these positive behaviors?  How do these benefits relate to costs and disadvantages?  Also, the study was in a survey questionnaire form completed by a supervisor, which could have had some skewed results due to biases. The study was also conducted on only one company, a public safety organization, which results could have differed for a different company or different type of business or organization.  In addition to the type of organization the study was conducted on, the job and tasks themselves can be an enormous limitation.  The figure below illustrates how the task routineness (TR) effects team behavior; the more monotonous the task, the less efficient teams will be.  

Source: Team Self-Managing Behavior and Team Effectiveness: The Moderating Effect of Task Routineness

A constraint with implementing this recommendation is that by giving teams too much freedom, social loafing may occur. This is why it is important for leaders to know when and how to step away from the control and not to the point where there is no direction with the team.  Other disadvantages of self-managed teams can include a longer timeframe to complete the project, high investment, employee inability, demand for equal treatment, and potentially recklessness.  It is important to understand not only all of the benefits derived from a self-managed team, but even more so the disadvantages.