Tyranny of Teams Essay Example for Free

Tyranny of Teams EssaySome alternate perspectives on police squad behaviour elucidate the ways in which the prevailing paradigm ultimately hinders groups and tyrannizes the various(prenominal) team member mdash by camouflaging coercion and conflict with the appearance of consultation and cohesion. Examination of the limits and effects of the political theory forget the basis for an alternative understanding of the strengths, constraints and complexities of group survey. Introduction Teams in various forms shit become ubiquitous ways of working.As task forces, committees, work groups and quality circles, they ar used to provide leading, accomplish research, maximize creativity and operationalize structural flexibility (Peters and Waterman 1982 Payne The 1988) . prescriptions of oftentimes contemporary management thinking are base on a dominant ideology of teamwork. While teams have been narrowly construed as a hawkshaw of the Organization Development Model, the ideol ogy is much more pervasive.Teams are embraced as tools of diverse models of organizational domesticate from organization development (Dunphy 1976) to work restructuring (Poza and Markus 1980), from quality management to industrial democracy and from corporate culture and Nipponese management approaches to complex contingency prescriptions. 611 Beliefs about the benefits of teams occupy a central and unquestioned place in organizational reform. It is all the more surprising that, despite some differences in context, the team ideology has been espoused with such(prenominal) consistency.The hegemony of this ideology has been supported by researchers who offer the team as a tantalizingly simple antecedent to some of the intracDownloaded from http//oss. sagepub. com at Massey University Library on June 28, 2010 612 problems of organizational life. Teams appear to satisfy everything individual needs (for sociability, self-actualization, participative management), organizational needs (for productivity, organizational development, effectiveness) and even societys needs for alleviating the malaise of alienation and other by-products of new-fangled industrial society (Johnson and Johnson 1987).However, do work groups deserve the status they have acquired as multipurpose panaceas for organizational problems? As has been powerfully argued in organizational analysis (Burrell and Morgan 1979 Astley and Van de Ven 1983 Reed 1985 Alvesson 1987), the dominance of a peculiar(a) paradigm has substantial costs in the institutionalization of table at once mechanisms of control. The purpose of this article is to stock-take the ideological basis of the prevailing team paradigm.Four sets of assumptions which underpin the ideology are identified 1. narrowly conceived definitions of work groups and group work are based on the assumption that mature teams are task-oriented, and have successfully minimized corruption by other group impulses. 2. It is an individual motivation for mula and a unitary view of organizations which assumes confluence, not conflict, between individual, group and organizational goals (Burrell and Morgan 1979 204). 3.Simplistic views of the superiority of participative leaders are held. 4. The views are also held that power, conflict and emotion are subversive forces which divert groups from work. Research from some alternative critical, psychoanalytic and other perspectives is used to suggest some areas in which the paradigm requires overhaul. A premise of this idea is that teams can contribute to getting work of all kinds done, but not when their application is informed by a narrow framework that nurtures inappropriate expectations.Further, and more critically, the team ideology embraced by these assumptions tyrannizes because, under the measure of benefits to all, teams are frequently used to camouflage coercion under the pretence of maintaining cohesion conceal conflict under the guise of consensus convert conformity into a sem blance of creativity give unilateral decisions a co-determinist seal of approval delay action in the supposed interests of consultation legitimize lack of leadership and disguise expedient arguments and personal agendas.Definitions of Teams and Group Work theorists have defined a team as a distinctive class of which is more task-oriented than other groups, and which has a set group, of obvious rules and rewards for its members (Adair 1986). According to this view, high-performing teams tack collective goals and an inter- Management Downloaded from http//oss. sagepub. com at Massey University Library on June 28, 2010 613 est in the task at hand for individual agendas and inter-personal conflicts.Group theorists have noted the parallels between therapeutic groups and other types of work groups (Foulkes 1964 110). However, the emphasis of team ideology on the task-orientation of teams has tended to idealize and resist recognizing that groups with a task still experience anti-task beha viour, and indeed have much in common with other types of groups. Seeking to understand both individual and group work, researchers have, on the whole, been long by the search for discrete or measurable outputs of work. Work has many forms.Some definitions of individual public presentation and effectiveness in administrative and managerial (Likert 1967 Sorenson 1971) with creativity and innovation in research or scientific contexts (Gordon 1961 Sch6n 1963), yet such experimental measures often seem to bear little resemblance to individual experiences of work (Terkel 1974) . Efforts to define group work by researchers in the team ideology tradition have produced a range of measures referring either to the output or to the quality of group process.