Page 277 - DCOM102_DMGT101_PRINCIPLES_AND_PRACTICES_OF_MANAGEMENT

Unit 15: Team and Team Work

7. Creative talents: Applying individual talents and creativity. Notes
8. Rapid response: Identifying, and acting on, opportunities.
These eight attributes effectively combine many of today’s most progressive ideas on
management: among them being participation, empowerment, service ethic, individual
responsibility and development, self-management, trust, active listening, and envisioning.
But patience and diligence are required. According to a manager familiar with work teams
“high-performance teams may take three to five years to build”. Let us keep this inspiring
model of high performance teams in mind as we conclude our discussion of team-building.
15.3.2 Developing Team Members’ Self-management Skills

A promising dimension of team-building has emerged in recent years. It is an extension of the
behavioural self-management approach. Proponents call it self-management leadership, defined
as the process of leading others to lead themselves. An underlying assumption is that
self-management teams are likely to fail if team members are not expressly taught to engage in
self-management behaviours. This makes sense because it is unreasonable to expect employees
who are accustomed to being managed and then led to suddenly manage and lead themselves.
A major transition to self-management involves current managers engaging in self-management
leadership behaviours. This is team-building in the fullest meaning of the term.
Six self-management leadership behaviours were isolated in a field study of manufacturing
company organised around self-managed teams. The observed behaviours were:
1. Encourages self-reinforcement

Example: Getting team members to praise each other for good work and results
2. Encourages self-observation/evaluation

Example: Teaching team members to judge how well they are doing
3. Encourages self-expectation

Example: Encouraging team members to expect high performance from themselves and
the team
4. Encourages self goal-setting

Example: Having the team set its own performance goals
5. Encourages rehearsal

Example: Getting team members to think about and practice new tasks
6. Encourages self-criticism

Example: Encouraging team members to be critical of their own poor performance
According to the researchers, Charles Manz and Henry Sims, this type of leadership is a dramatic
departure from traditional practices such as giving orders and/or making sure everyone gets
along. Empowerment, not domination, is the overriding goal.

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