Team Independence and Inter-Team Conflict
Many contemporary organizations have moved to the establishment of work teams that exist for varying periods of time, charged with specific time sensitive or ongoing projects viewed as vital to the well-being of the organization (Kugler, Rapoport, & Pazy, 2010). Work teams can be extremely useful mechanisms for fostering innovation but at the same time organizations including such companies as Cisco Systems and Dell have found that teams are also a locus of conflict and that it is necessary for management to determine what level of task independence will be permitted in the actions of teams. Task independence is generally understood as referring to the degree to which a work team has autonomy with respect to task related decisionmaking (Caswell & Allen, 2001). Inter-team conflict refers to the kinds of disagreements emerging within teams as individuals struggle to acquire or use power, to shape or influence relationships, and to promote a particular point of view (Desivilya, Somech, & Lidgoster, 2010).
It is generally difficult according to Caswell and Allen (2001), for organizations to determine how much independence any work team should enjoy under all possible sets of circumstances. Certainly, there is a strong belief among organizations like Cisco (Kanter, 2011), that a work team regardless of its name or designation must possess sufficient autonomy to be able to achieve its goals and objectives. At the same time, companies such as Dell (2011) have learned that allowing teams sufficient flexibility is often achieved at the expense of close monitoring and supervision; this does not mean that flexibility land independence are not valued at Dell, but this particular Information Technology company has come to the conclusion that its approach to maintaining global teams requires an amount of level of team independence that might not be equally useful in other contexts. This is b...