Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 6th Edition

CHAPTER TWELVETEAMWORK: UNDERSTANDING COMMUNICATION AND CONFLICT IN GROUPS

When the US Internal Revenue Service went through the major transformation described at the beginning of Chapter Eight, it appointed twenty-four design teams to plan the new structures and processes the organization would need. Employees from all levels and many different locations came together to work in these teams, and they had to communicate effectively and confront and resolve conflicts. To emphasize the importance attached to these teams, the commissioner and the deputy commissioner of the IRS met with each of the teams in intensive sessions. The commissioner became virtually legendary within the organization for the attentiveness with which he prepared for the meetings by doing all the reading, listened in the meetings, and responded to each meeting with a “whitepaper” that provided a written reaction to the information communicated in the meeting. Meanwhile, the commissioner also continued to communicate with the people in the IRS about the changes that were going on, through videotaped talks, the organizational newsletter, and other channels. The next chapter describes how the Social Security Administration reorganized its public service centers into groups of about forty people in “modules” that would handle the processing of an individual client's claim. In effect, these modules were work teams. The National Organizations Survey is apparently the only survey of a probability sample of organizations ...