MGT3002

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Organizational Behavior

2 Individual and Group Decision Making, Work Teams, Quality Management and Teams

MGT3002 W3 L2

Which is better—individual or group decision-making? This is not an easy question to answer. Generally speaking better-quality decisions come from groups. This is because groups contain people with a variety of experiences and information that can be pooled together and these diverse views can be examined by all of the group members. Individuals are also more committed to the final decision because of their participation in the decision-making process.

However, individual decision-making is usually faster, and when deadlines lead to time constraints group decision-making may not be an available option. Furthermore, in groups the pressures of conformity and dominance by individual members may hinder the other members' efforts to pool their knowledge and ideas together. As a result, individual decision-making may appear to be more efficient in these situations while the group decision-making process may appear clumsier.

There are two kinds of phenomena, groupthink and groupshift, that are common in group decision-making processes. These phenomena can significantly affect the quality of decisions.

Thus, members may withhold minority, unpopular, or unpleasant views as a result of invisible group pressures. These members may seek acceptance and concurrence in the group. Some people have referred to groupthink as a disease because it can limit effective decision-making, which can lead to disastrous consequences.

For example, the groupthink phenomenon in NASA's decision- making processes has been linked to the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Key decision-makers ignored warning signs as they felt pressured to conform to the belief that NASA does not make

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Organizational Behavior

3 Individual and Group Decision Making, Work Teams, Quality Management and Teams

MGT3002 W3 L2

mistakes. Some of them minimized their concerns as "probably not very important," and some thought that their associates would label them as paranoid if they brought attention to these problems.

For example, if the initial position is conservative, the final shift is usually toward more cautious decisions; however, the shift is more often toward high risk. Thus, the group ultimately makes higher-risk decisions than the individuals would on their own; group members may feel emboldened to take more risky and unrealistic decisions because the blame will be spread among all of the decision- makers if they fail.

Both groupshift and groupthink are problems that need to be recognized so that the group can move toward a more realistic level of discussions, analyses, and decision-making. Many companies actively encourage dissenting and uncommon views as a way of preventing groupthink and groupshift.

In a typical work group, jobs are allocated to the members on an individual basis and they carry individual responsibility and authority. In contrast with a work group, a work team has collective or joint responsibility and authority. The work group meets primarily to share information and make decisions while the work team meets for a collective and coordinated effort to perform tasks.

Work teams are useful for various kinds of activities, such as in manufacturing, services, and contract negotiations. Their increasing popularity is an indication of their effectiveness. The most common types of work teams are problem solving teams, cross-functional teams, self-managed teams, and virtual teams.

Problem-solving teams meet to share information and ideas and develop suggestions for improvement. Quality circles are the most common example of a problem-solving team. These are teams of

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Organizational Behavior

4 Individual and Group Decision Making, Work Teams, Quality Management and Teams

MGT3002 W3 L2

eight to ten people of the same work group who meet periodically to discuss quality problems and try to find solutions for them.

Cross-functional teams are multi-disciplinary teams that are created with members from various departments to address specific jobs and problems. A task force is a common example of a temporary cross-functional team.

Perhaps the most successful teams have been the self- managed work teams, also referred to as semi-autonomous work teams. These have been used, principally in manufacturing, to replace traditional assembly-line operations.

A newly emerging work team called a virtual team uses computer technology to connect team members. Individual team members do not have face-to-face contact, but collaborate online through computer networks when dealing with tasks. The members may be from the same organization or from completely different companies and settings. For example, a virtual team operating from different parts of the globe may successfully design an online course without ever having a face-to-face meeting. Another good example of successful virtual teams is the game mod team, where people across the globe come together through the Internet to develop different components of a computer game. Each member of this team tries to contribute his or her best work, as the game mod is a portfolio of his or her strengths. Game manufacturers recruit talented game developers from these mods.

On the assembly line a complex task is divided into a number of simple jobs that can be performed using limited but specialized skills. The planning, scheduling, and allocation of these jobs are done by supervisors and managers. Employees perform the individual jobs that result in the assembly of the parts into the final manufactured unit.

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Organizational Behavior

5 Individual and Group Decision Making, Work Teams, Quality Management and Teams

MGT3002 W3 L2

In contrast, self-managed work teams handle a complete job and operate with some degree of authority; they can schedule tasks, allocate and rotate jobs among themselves, and deal with problems as they arise. This approach involves multi-tasking, unlike the specialized skills needed by workers on an assembly line. For example, one of General Electric's aircraft manufacturing plants allocates the entire job of assembling an aircraft engine to a work team.

Many projects have been successfully achieved with self-managed teams, particularly in areas like manufacturing, vendor relations, and management. However, there have also been reports of companies that have been disappointed with the results, indicating that these teams are only effective in certain situations. Further studies are needed to identify the kinds of situations in which these teams are most effective.

Since the 1970s, strong competition from manufacturers in countries including Japan, Germany, and South Korea has led American companies to make a concerted effort to improve quality. With the success of quality circles in Japan, American companies have begun to recognize that employee involvement through work teams is important for quality management. While not all companies are enthusiastic about the use of work teams, evidence does suggest that they are becoming more popular.

This is a more hands-on approach to dealing with quality issues than more traditional methods. Employees on the factory floor possess a great deal of practical knowledge, which when applied through a team approach can solve many quality problems and increase efficiency. To implement this strategy, a company needs to create small groups of employees that address quality issues of products that they are manufacturing. These teams can share

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Organizational Behavior

6 Individual and Group Decision Making, Work Teams, Quality Management and Teams

MGT3002 W3 L2

ideas on quality issues and analyze and develop suggestions that they can then implement.

For these groups and teams to operate effectively, the members need to communicate with each other. The following section will look at methods of communication and their associated problems.