In today's corporate environment, most companies are focusing on creating a workforce comprised of people that work well together. Teamwork has become a popular means of accomplishing goals. Most companies subscribe to the belief that "teams are most often considered to be a viable means to increase the capacity of an organization to deal with changing demands, and are introduced with the objective of improving the effectiveness of the organization, as well as the quality of working life for employees." (Molleman) There is one question that begs to be answered- are these teams truly successful in accomplishing their tasks? This paper will focus on elements that when combined, lead to successful self managed teams. The paper is based on an article written by Eric Molleman titled: Modalities of self-managing teams- The "must", "may", "can" and "will" of local decision making. The focus will be on teams that are self managed, meaning the team has the ability to determine what they are capable of accomplishing and how they are going to reach their potential. Molleman points out that many authors believe that most successful teams are self managed and have the ability to make decisions on a local level. When companies look to develop successful teams, they must ask themselves 4 types of questions.
The first question that must be asked is the "must" question. To be more specific, is the use of self managed teams a must have for the organization? According to Molleman, self-managed teams are indeed a must in today's corporate environment. Molleman asserts that the criteria for determining the need for self-managed teams, is when the relationship between coping with variety in environment involves variety in outcome characteristics. (3) If the variety of work is low, the work becomes repetitive and there is little need for self-managed teams. However, if the variety of the work is high, and the decisions required involve more complex solutions, than there becomes a greater need for these teams.