Organizational Redesign: A Case Study

Ehrbar (1993, pp. A1, A11) reported on a trend toward organizational redesigns that enabled firms to reduce substantially workforce size. The actions taken by the companies provided some benefits in the shortrun; however, over the longrun, organizational structure will not support efficient operations, employees will no longer be committed to the firms, and organizational leadership will be discredited. A superior strategy for these firms would be the adoption of the team concept of organization design within the context of sociotechnical systems.

Teambased organization is another form of structure "in which members of different functional departments work together in small, but more or less permanent, teams headed by the member from the most professional prestigious specialty" (Gortner, Mahler, and Nicholson, 1989, p. 111). Team members "maintain their ties to functional departments for personnel, training, promotion, and other such matters, but they work face to face principally with members of other departments to achieve the level of coordinated expertise demanded by their tasks" (Gortner, Mahler, and Nicholson, 1989, p. 111).

Teamdevelopment promotes the idea that individuals who have working relationships with one another within an organizational structure can be trained to work as a team (Larson and LaFasto, 1989, pp. 1326). Participants in a team building process learn to build good relationships

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votes its energies to broader responsibilities, such as planning, and providing direction and support for SMWTs (Barton, 1991, pp. 5859). Within such an organizational environment, management retains authority over strategy, while the SMWTs assumes authority for tactics within a framework of goals established by management (Owens, 1991, pp. 5365). Responsibility and accountability are major issues affecting the effectiveness and acceptability of SMWTs (Is your team just a fad? 1992, pp. 6768). Without clear lines of responsibility and authority, work teams are not truly selfmanaging, nor are they ever likely to be fully accepted within the organization. Rather, they simply become a manifestation of the latest management fad (Is you team just a fad? 1992, pp. 6768). The informal organization within a firm reflects the patterns of activity through which the work of a firm is actually accomplished (Galagan, 1992, pp. 2630). Such informal organizations reflect a phenomenon in which natural hierarchies assert themselves whenever human beings organize to work (Ross, 1992, pp. 4651). The creation or development of work teams within an organization structure is, in essence, a reflection of the informal organization of the fi
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