This literature review concerning the topic of "Effects of Group Factors on Work Team Outcomes" addresses the following areas relevant to this study: teamwork in organizations; work team building (stages of group development, group facilitators, team wellness, and success and failure factors); self-directed teams; factors related to work team success (group autonomy and leadership; group cohesion, diversity, and conflict; group support and rewards; group training; and group empowerment and communication); and conclusion.
Fluxman (1999) reported that teamwork in organizations is an important trend with the increasing technological innovations that are taking place. This author used the automotive industry to provide an example of teamwork models found worldwide. The Japanese Team Concept and the Scandinavian Team Concept emerged in the last two decades. These approaches reorganize production work into teams. These models redesign jobs for integrated work teams in order to increase worker motivation, output quality, and productivity. Horizontal and vertical integration are utilized with task autonomy. Team-based systems require employee training and plant redesign and imply long-term commitment to employees.
Fluxman (1999) stated that for the Japanese model the work teams are assigned a cohesive set of tasks that take place along a moving assembly line (with modern approaches including unpaced asynchronous mixed-model assembly lines). Workers are organized into teams and tasks performed by team members are related though performed independently. Teams are responsible for machine setup, maintenance, quality inspection, and control functions. The Scandinavian model included group assembly with vertical task integration where work teams accept control over the work process. There is no moving assembly line; teams work on vehicles until a task is complete. Comprehensive training is an important part of the team building...