Advantages and Disadvantages of Team Decision Making

Self-managing work teams are being formed in business organizations that want to achieve greater flexibility, empower employees in making decisions, and maximize the use of their employees' intellectual and creative abilities (Wageman, 1997). These work groups are seen as having the capacity to improve, often quite significantly, organizational performance, learning and adaptability. They are also viewed as strengthening employees' commitment to the company.

It is the purpose of this report to review the literature on team decision making to identify its strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages. This problem û the relative effectiveness of team-centered decision making û will be explored both theoretically as well as with respect to empirical studies. It will be argued that team decision-making is most viable in work settings in which the corporate culture supports innovation, employee empowerment and autonomy, and non-authoritarian leadership.

Pierce and Newstrom (2000) have described team or group decision making as part of an overall strategy of participative leadership in which the authoritarian mode of decision making is replaced with a more egalitarian set of strategies to achieve consensus. As companies move from an authoritarian supervisory and hierarchical framework to a new emphasis on small groups, work teams, and employee empowerment, more and more d

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993) examined a number of traits associated with great decision makers and with teams or groups that make effective decisions leading to consensus. A high tolerance for ambiguity, a well-ordered sense of priorities, the capacity for listening thoroughly and well, the ability to avoid stereotypes and remain resilient, and the determination to build consensus around a decision are identified by this analyst as vital in the decision making process. Noting that decisions are the building block of life, Dawson (1993) also recommends the use of decision trees in which options are explored and potential consequences of each decision are identified to the extent possible. Dawson (1993) and Vroom (2000) both believe that this model is conducive to the elimination of conflict in decision making and instrumental in facilitating consensus. It is also a form of rational decision making that can be employed by either an individual decision-maker or a group. Discussion Kleindorfer (2001) considers team decision-making to be a new paradigm that has emerged because of the increasing complexity of work environments. In the new group approach to achieving consensus, decision making is viewed as a rolling two-stage process. The first stage f
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Sager Gastil, Discussion Kleindorfer, Kuhn Poole, Conclusions Sales, Introduction Self-managing, Pierce Newstrom, Irwin/McGraw Hill, Similarly Wageman, Resource Planning, Applied Psychology, vroom 2000, team decision, lewis 1997, hinsz 1995, pierce newstrom, gastil 1999, sager gastil, sales 2000, sager gastil 1999, dawson 1993, leaders leadership process, leadership process, kuhn poole 2000, process boston irwin/mcgraw, conflict management styles,
Approximate Word count = 2164
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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