Challenges of Teamwork in Production: Demands of Communication
Organization Studies · 2006 · Volume 27 · Issue 1
Abstract
Implementing teamwork in production is an element of a gradual transfer of the company's steering from coordination by hierarchy to a form of coordination which can be characterized as discursive coordination. This generates an increasing density of communication which is the actual challenge — for the team members as well as for the organization as a whole. Workers often unused to communicating at work have to guarantee cooperation and control by self-regulating and so are forced to communicate more than before; superiors who are afraid of losing their influence, status, power and at worst their jobs have to treat workers as experts rather than as recipients of orders. The question is therefore why organizations expose themselves to challenges like these. Regarding the neo-institutionalistic concept of isomorphism it can be argued that the dissemination of teamwork in production is a case of mimetic isomorphism. But a new guideline for rationalization, in this case the implementation of teamwork, must suit the internal situation. Organizations are structurally conservative and react cautiously to the promises offered by new concepts such as teamwork; they cannot reject concepts which are taken for granted in their organizational field, but that does not guarantee realization of the concepts. Obviously, processes of mimetic isomorphism refer to concepts of rationalization rather than to transferred structures.
Keywords
teamwork, communication in organizations, conflict, cooperation, neoinstitutionalistic theory, organizational change
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