Chapter 8: Teamwork and Work Team

It is interesting to learn that teamwork is a fairly new concept introduced in the United States in 1898. This would have been 110 years ago. According to the textbook, most American employees now work in some form of team-based organization. In addition to individual responsibilities, employees are members of a working group, committee, or cohort. I appreciate the concept of work team where a group of employees is responsible for the entire process ranging from training, maintenance, to hiring and making compensation decisions. To be successful it requires supervisor overseeing. My relation to this concept is of supervising an operation with 8 operators (who we could consider a work team). It is true that supervisors would need to (1) faciliate to keep group on track (looking at production line for backlog and yet not rush operators), (2) be hard on rules, agendas, goals, and accountability (at same time allow operator to package the products the way that it is efficient for them), and lastly (3) communicate extensively to keep team inform of work of other teams (I made sure that I let the operators know what Customer Service Dept are expecting to ship out that day). My work experience is not exactly a work team, but I can see how the principle of good supervision could be applied to a work team.