Discussion on Modern Management

Essay by wainilamUniversity, Master'sA-, July 2009

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Modern management incorporates team empowerment and teamwork in place of supervisory and having the necessary skills within a team ensures success of the concept of management. This modern technique of management utilizes teamwork among employees in organization. Since the use of teams to handle various organization responsibilities implies a shift from the traditional supervisory relation to a team based approach effective teams need to posses skills that enable it to handle larger responsibilities. It seems to me like teamwork is more of delegation of more duties from supervisor to workers in their teams. With this approach, concepts such as empowerment of teams arise. This paper evaluates the way team functions, different skills needed in teams and the concept of team empowerment.

According to Katzenbach and Smith, (1998) a team is a small group of people who are joined together by a common purpose and performance goal. Teams work together to attain the goals and are accountable for their actions.

Teams are formed on two basic assumptions as advanced by (Katz 1995, Kotter 1990). First, that use of teams transfers more responsibility form supervisor to workers, which then implies that workers need added skills to handle enlarged responsibilities and secondly that management has capacity to influence skill structure in teams.

According to Katz and Kotters assumption, teams cause changes in work organization and skills are a requisite. However, this assumption has limitations because it is difficult separate supervisors' responsibilities from those of the teams. Further, it is unclear how much responsibility should be shifted to teams. However, the decision lies with management and leadership who are in charge of determining the amount of responsibility depending on the value placed on teams, the willingness of middle management to share responsibility, skills possessed by teams and so on. Katz assumption suggests the capacity...