This study assessed a proposal to restructure the Customer Service Department of the Santa Fe Railroad into a team-based organization. The specific manifestation of the team concept proposed for the Customer Service Department is an organization based upon high-performance, self-directed work teams. The problem investigated and ancillary information related to this problem is presented in this chapter.
The business environment of the mid-1990s in the United States, together with the business environment that will emerge as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) begins to be implemented, places American business firms under tremendous competitive pressures. To survive in this dynamic era, the level of performance must be improved by all American firms. This imperative is particularly relevant in the industrial area of transportation and in the functional area of customer service where high costs associated with operations within the economy of the United States demand improved productivity (Caston, 1993, pp. 20-23; Ramsay and Lehto, 1994, pp. 38-41).
Productivity is a major concern in the 1990s of all profit-oriented organizations, regardless of size (Rothschild, 1993, pp. 17-18). Productivity levels within an organization are the product of a combination of physical, financial, and human resource inputs (Miles and McCloskey, 1993, pp. 40-45). A concern with organizational performance, thus, is one of the more significant of the problems that confront organizational managers in the last decade of the twentieth century (Hakim, 1993, pp. 46-49). The costs to an organization of sub-standard performance involve profit deterioration, the diversion of financial and human resources from production to diagnostic and corrective actions, and the introduction of discontinuity into organizational activities, just to enumerate a few (De Long and Summers, 1992, pp. 5-29).
Lagging productivity growth affects the ability...