at had made Microsoft successful. In effect, this is the same challenge that Beech and Crane (1999) address in their analysis of High Performance Team management. Their study presented an empirical survey of an organization's attempt to improve from its existent structure of team working to a higher level of organizational performance through the development of enhanced, or high performance, teams.
Beech and Crane point to the progress made in three areas: the contribution of people management to organizational performance, leadership and team working. Herbold approaches this concept when he addresses some of the team challenges at Microsoft, arguing that there is an approach toward community. climate of community.
The article suggests that his first few weeks were spent trying to deal with the multi-method approach to examine the development from teams to high performance teams, which focused on "soft" process inputs, but which had to have both qualitative and quantitative outcomes. The analysis revealed three factors which were crucial to development: transparency, checkability and a climate of community. As he states
Our drive to impose the discipline of a centralized system and standard practices most often affected functional areas such as finance, procurement and human resources, for which I had direct responsibility. But we went beyond that. We also used similar approaches to increase efficiency in more strategic areas (Herbold).
There is a synergy among fields of organizational performance, team working and leadership. Each field has been developing towards a view that could be conceptualized under the heading of community. Research on the contribution of people management to organizational performance outcomes such as productivity and profitability has been related to a climate of satisfaction in the workplace. The importance of the climate is that it transcends individual satisfaction and hence has a...