As per the article "Self Managed Work Teams Don't Just Happen", self managed work teams are groups of people organized in cells with enough authority to managed themselves without a defined authority figure like a supervisor. The team by itself assigns the roles and responsibilities to be performed by each team member. The amount of responsibilities in this kind of structure varies from one company to the other. In some companies, the self managed team still has some "chain of command" attached to it, in others, the team can decide over the future of fellow team mates.
These teams" group together members with different skills but with the same purpose in mind in order to performed the job at hand. This has proved to be fruitful in many companies were this effort has been established. Of course, there are many others were the self managed teams has been a failure. The challenges to overcome are many and not easy. .
Training is a big factor in the implementation of self managed teams. Training employees is really expensive. Not only the cost of the training but also the fact that the employee, while in training, is not productive. Also, when manufacturing schedules turns tight, is common to see managers pulling out resources from the training and putting them back together into the line.
Another problem affecting self-managed teams is management's survival. Managers will feel vulnerable as a result of teams working without a specific leader. Feeling threatened managers will succumb to sabotage team efforts for the sake of job security. Upper management has to find a way to deal with managers and supervisors to ease their fears and help them in their development within the organization.
Pressure among peers is what drives these teams to work efficiently. However, some employees do not think that another peer should be auditing each other's work, especially when different levels of education and experience are on the line.