Manager's Guide to Virtual Teams

Chapter 10Improving the Business IQ of Team Members

We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone . . . and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.

—Sandra Day O’Connor

Several years ago, in an article entitled “Substitutes for Hierarchy” (Organizational Dynamics, Summer 1988), prolific management writer Edward Lawler introduced the idea that highly empowered teams required not the elimination of hierarchy and management, but different processes (such as education and training, technical controls, and real-time information) as a substitute for them. This idea may be more important today than it was when it was at the time it was ...