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37

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TEXT 14 

 

Teams And The New Workplace 

 

One of the most important developments in the modern company is 

the use of work teams. A work team is a group that works together to 

produce a much higher quality output than people who are working 

alone. Especially when a job requires judgment and several different 

skills, work teams do much better than individual workers. The change 

to teamwork requires different personal skills than working alone. 

It means that employees need a higher level of cooperation, that 

they must share information, that they place the needs of the group over 

their personal needs. Some cultures are naturally more group-oriented—

for example Japan and Mexico. They are more used to working together. 

Other countries—the US and England, for example—are individual. In 

such countries, much more training is needed to develop successful 

teams. We can think of this individual-group concept in the following 

way. As we move from left to right, the cultures become more group-

oriented:  

Individual  Group  USA          England          France          Germany      Arab     

Slavic     Latin     East Asian 

Another major concept in modern management is Total Quality 

Management  (TQM). TQM is a program for constantly improving 

processes (such as design, inventory control, manufacturing) in a 

company. 

One of the keys to TQM is involving the employees. In other words, 

encouraging workers to share ideas and put those ideas into practice. 

Studies show that the best way to do this is through work teams. 

The Ford Motor Company began its TQM program in the early 1980s 

and used work teams as the principle way to develop the program. One 

example of work teams is the American company John Deere, that 

manufactures farm equipment. Some assembly-line workers at Deere are 

also part of the sales team that calls on customers.