aughter details the main characteristics of the concept as follows:
1) The workforce is divided into teams of four to twenty workers, and they in turn elect a leader and hold meetings to discuss problems in the workplace.
2) One of the main goals of this system is to increase management flexibility by abolishing or reducing the number of job classifications as much as possible.
3) Workers learn and perform more tasks than is true in a traditional plant, and this means that the number of jobs can be reduced considerably.
4) Workers are expected to have more interest in and take more responsibility for their jobs.
5) The goal is to foster a new spirit of harmony between local union and management as both join in the common effort to make their plant more competitive (p. 9).
The change from the traditional management structure to the team concept involves more than cosmetic changes and more than simply imposing a new system. As Oliver and Davies (1990) note: "Empirical evidence demonstrates a profoundly political dimension to these innovations, requiring a significant rewriting of organizations' political and cultural maps" (p. 555). Part of this shift involves a change in communication styles and patterns in keeping with the new relationship between management and the labor force.
The concept of communication in the organization involves a number of specific elements and processes which are repeated again and again within the organizational structure. Hersey and Blanchard (1988) note that communications pass through perceptual "filters" which create the possibility of a communication breakdown at any point in the process. The process is circular, from leader to followers and from followers to leader. The leader's perceptions filter the communication. The communication may be words, paralanguage, and/or nonverbals. The follower's perceptions next filter the communications and determine how the follower rec...