A lot has been written about self-managing teams, more as an ideology than as a really researched subject. Often it is used to re-organise and do away with lower management levels. In the Netherlands there have been many experiments with this in for example home care health system and mental health care agencies. Most have been ended.

The reasons the organisations stop with self-managed teams are that only some people pick up the tasks and work that goes with getting the work organised such as making work schedules, administration, coordination of tasks, checking up on what has been done etc. When that is not recognised as being actual work and comes on top of their “real” work, these people become over-burdened and burn-out threatens.

Another problem is that self-managed groups experience unmanaged group processes, power struggles disguised as something else, processes that can spiral out of control and make life hell. Mobbing, harrassment are the result and without management there is no way of reporting this and getting help.

Good experiences with self-management are when a team can make its own work schedule when that is a complicated process such as nurses on a ward or busdrivers on shifts.

Researchers from the Tavistock Institute in London wrote about this first when they researched coal mining in the UK in the 1950’s.

What could be an in-road to your subject is a comparison between the formal hierarchy and structure and the informal hierarchy or structure. Self-managing teams can be considered to be a legitimisation of an informal structure.

I hope you find this helpful.

A team is a small number of people—commonly three to about 10 (but sometimes larger), purportedly equipped with complementary skills, who are committed to a common purpose and reach agreement on specific performance targets and indicators, a working approach, and mutual accountability. Defining what a team is (supposed to be) sets the parameters of the team as a social group and can focus attention on what the fundamental commonalities of teams should be, irrespective of whether they are "traditional" or "self-managed", e.g., accountability, approach, purpose, results-orientation, skills, trust, etc. (How "traditional" and "self-managed" teams deliver across these shared dimensions is a different story.)

You''re exploring an interesting area. We have been working with the self-managed teams concept for several years as part of our focus on building out an innovation system within our organization.

I agree with the observations noted by Lilian Hupkens but would add a few things worth considering. First, we are seeing generational differences in how people respond to this way of working. Our workforce comprises four generations and there are clearly differences in what people expect from their employer in terms of their work experience. Technology also plays a huge role in how self-managed teams operate. In our case, an important part of setting up our innovation practice was to create spaces and leverage technology in different ways. On the process side of things, our observation is that self-managed teams need to be assigned a clear mandate and just-in-time training that provides what they need when they need it is also important.

We used field questions to assess participants' work experience. Over the three years we used this approach, about 90% indicated they would do it again and found it to be a powerful leadership development opportunity. About 10% found the lack of structure frustrating and described the self-managed approach as a waste of time.

You might find some useful insights but checking out the research on design thinking and innovation as the self-managed approach is commonly used in these environments.

Adding to Lory’s excellent contribution, see the following publication:

Helga D Hohn did research on the links between innovation, teams and theory on groups. Her thesis is “Playing, leadership and team development in innovative teams”, 1999 Technological University Delft in the Netherlands.

What makes this thesis, and the book that followed it, so interesting is that she has also made a chart of the most important studies of groups, group dynamics and group behaviour from 1880 to the end of the 1990’s. She demonstrates that when suddenly the “creative” or “innovative” teams came into the fore and into literature around 1990, there were practically no links made to a century’s theory on groups and teams. It was as if this team stuff was a new phenemenon spontaneously dropped from the skies. Much to the detriment ofthe new “creative teams” because they more or less denied or ignored interpersonal dynamics which can be very harmful.

This is what I also observe in the writings about self-managed teams. A lot of hosannah and hallelujah, and not do reality based and theory underpinned apprehension.

That can lead to failure through self-sabotage.

Dear Lilian Hupkens, Olivier Serrat and Lory Block, thank you for the very constructive answers. I have deeply considered each word and when comparing to previous researches made on the self-managing teams, I see that there is barely any study on comparisons between the self-managing teams and the other teams (i.e. traditional teams - if we can call like this the teams from the already-familiar-with concepts).

However, I could notice there is a trend of researches focused mostly in case studies, or some using some combined study methods in specific industries, like education, production or nursing. The diversity of the studied facets is really wide, thus it is not really easy to focus on some very specific aspects of self-managing teams, which could be measured with previously-validated instruments. Nevertheless, considering that most of the companies/organizations have apriori goals to increase both the performance and job satisfaction of their employees (which would result in higher profit and motivation), it would be interesting to pay attention to these aspects and consider further research in frameworks of self-managing teams. Your commitment in suggesting any popular method of gathering data (i.e. specific instruments/questionnaires) for these facets, is highly appreciated.

Moreover, according to some of your recommendations, these types of teams are mostly spread in "creative" industries, which means that one of the main principles of their existence should potentially be "the innovation". The thing is that in Kosovo, where I am planning to undertake the field research, I am afraid that these concepts are still not very familiar for people in general. Notwithstanding, there are some organizations, which cannot be considered pure companies, neither pure non-profit organizations, whose settings are created to offer conditions for "innovating" and creating start-ups. Maybe this might be a good target to develop my field research in context of finding the respective teams with self-managing characteristics.

Your further remarks would be warmly welcomed.

Thank you,

Besnik

Dear Besnik,

my recommendation would be not to start off with finding a measuring method if you want to compare self-managed teams with hierarchically structured teams. When you know WHATyou want to know/measure, then you can find a method to fit that.

It would be difficult to do research in a vacuum; there has to be a foundation on which you could build.

Do you want to measure self- versus hierarchically managed teams in Kosovo = working in a vacuum. OR do you want to compare the Kosovo situation with something already measured elsewhere? For example comparing nursing teams in Kosovo with nurses in UK or Germany if there is research already done there.

Or do exploratory research that can be a basis for further research, for example do a survey, find out which organisations in Kosovo are already experimenting with self-managed teams and why, what reasons do they give for this. Either you compare that to reasons given in literature, or you can go deeper into what the reasons are.

Try to make the field of research small first, otherwise it will become too big for a masters dissertation. If the first inventory of organisations goes well, and fast, then you can do some more research.

OR you keep it small by finding one self-managed team and compare it to one other normal team.

Hope these comments help your design.

My experience is that getting something done can often override the learning that the work is intended to drive. You're interested in self-managing teams - still a relatively new concept in organizational life outside of start ups. What are you most interested in understanding? Start there. I think the idea of exploratory research is a good one, and the beginning of many of the rich bodies of literature we have today. I personally would begin with a case study and see what it tells me. Are you open to doing qualitative research?

An update on self-managed teams in the Netherlands: according to a quality newspaper today, most of the health services, community health, are stopping with the concept of self-managing teams. The reason given is that it doesn’t work when the workers become lower or less educated than tertiairy (university level or specialized colleges) and that when the organisation needs to reorganise or change, then the management has no way of getting those changes through. This has led to bankrupcy in some cases. People like managing the good bits but not the hurtful bits that are necessary too.

Dear Besnik, just stumbled along this post now. Hope your project is progressing well. Our research group focuses on the 'agency' of teams (in different degrees of 'self management', which is an interesting but vaguele defined and often misused concept). I strongly recommend not seeing this 'self-management' concept as an absolute, but more as a scale. A lot has been written about this, in a popular and indeed almost ideological way, but also more thorough, for instance in the studies on sociotechnical systems.

If I can be of assistance in your study, by sharing some insights from our (mainly Dutch) case studies, let me know.

Dear Daniel, thank you for your answer.

I have already made a deep literature review on self-managing teams from two perspectives (according to Cohen, et al, 1996, adapted by Vragelaar, 2017), the predicting variables of self-managing teams and the outcomes of self-managing teams. Nevertheless, above all, authors agree that self-management in teams is more a relative concept than an absolute fact. It is also supported by Hackman (1986) through a matrix where he put in relation the level of self-management (from manager-led team to self-governing team) and the level of responsibility (from task execution to setting overall goal).

Thus, I am considering when collecting data about job satisfaction, motivation and perceived performance in such teams, to also measure the level of team self-management (adapting scales from Campion, et al., 1993 & 1996, Langfred, 2005, Leach, et al., 2005, Groenveld & Kuipers, 2014 and van der Hoek, 2018).

Meanwhile, your further insights from case studies are welcomed and I am sure that they would enrich my research.

Kind regards,

Besnik

Dear Besnik,

With Hackman, Leach, Cohen and others, you have a solid theoretical base from which you can surely build a good questionnaire. Feel free to contact me by sending me a message through Research Gate or by email ([email protected]) for specific questions I might be able to help you with. Good luck with your research!

Best wishes,

Daniel

Ps. Once finished, I'd definitely be interested to hear about the results on this forum or by other means.

Middelkoop mentions socio-technical systems as the origins of self-managed teams. The idea of leaderless teams was first introduced by Lewin and used by the Tavistock people during World War 2. I can recommend that you read an article by Trist who promoted that approach strongly.

You can find the article in the link. The same text was used in Volume 2 of the Tavistock Anthology of 1990.

http://www.lmmiller.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Evolution-of-Socio-Technical-Systems-Trist.pdf

Dear Daniel van Middelkoop I will come up to you with an e-mail soon. Thank you!

Dear Lilian Hupkens thank you for the reference. I will profoundly analyse it and surely it will be an added value to my research.

Meanwhile, I will be happy to share some updates about the thesis project-proposal (approved by the Committee) in the following days, and later an English version of the Master thesis.

Thank you Lilian for that link, very interesting. I am mainly known with the Dutch sociotechnical approach and less so with this work. Will read it with interest.

Dear Daniel,

A lot of work was done by the Tavistock people in the 50s and 60s that have permeated organisational sciece and consultancy. Unfortunately they did not publish enough to really claim it as their own and their use of psychodynamic theory made it difficult for them to get published, except in the Human Relations journal. Many people use their concepts and their work without knowing the foundations. Ik kan ook in het Nederlands schrijven want dat ben ik.

At the moment I am working on a phd thesis around some of their work.

Very interesting Lilian, thank you. In the Netherlands the 'Dutch sociotechnical approach' became important through the work of De Sitter mainly. It is still used these days in universities and in some consulting companies. You could check out the 'ST groep' (in 'Dutch).

Good luck with the PhD. Looking forward to your work.

What I gather from their site is that it is close to the QWL movement, quality of working life, pioneered by Trist and further developed by Emery. A lot of consultancy work in the Netherlands, starting in the 1970s, especially around change management and organisational culture was actually based on the Tavistock Instute’s work, although often unknown, unrecognized and not acknowledged. It is good to know the work is being kept alive.