Are "Teams" a meaningful unit? LO13766

Stever Robbins (stever@verstek.com)
Thu, 29 May 1997 09:37:55 -0400

Replying to LO13486 --

At 04:50 am 5/6/97 EDT, you wrote:
>>self-directed team was delegated the budgetary and resource allocation
>>authority to follow through on their suggestions

>This is a matter of allocating scarce resources. ...
>often perceived as squelching, but
>allocating scarce resources is what upper management get, paid to do.

Oh, I understand that quite well. That's my point: self-directed learning
teams are a limited concept in an economic system which, BY EXPLICIT
DESIGN, places resource allocation in the hands of a different part of the
system. If the goal is to have people feel like their ideas are worthy
and will get implemented, then the reason behind the denial of resources
is irrelevant. The bottom line is that the work they did as a "learning
team" came to nothing. If it happens a few times, they'll probably come
to adopt a pretty cynical attitude towards learning. They will have
learned the cycle: "learning => ideas => rejection."

- Stever

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