Making the Team: A Guide for Managers

The Team Paradox

Teamwork, to those in power in command-and-control organizations, is not necessarily a good thing. A major investigation of first-line supervisors to employee involvement programs revealed that 72 percent of supervisors view participative management as good for their company and 60 percent view it as good for employees, but only 31 percent view it as beneficial for themselves (Klein, 1984). Yet companies often expect middle managers to metamorphose into stellar team leaders, ready to coach, motivate, and empower. The problem is that few people understand how to make this transformational process and many probably have an incentive to see it unravel. For example, in one plant, resistance to participative management programs took ...