The Effective Leadership of Self-managing Work Teams
The Effective Leadership of Self-managing Work Teams
The main topic of my chosen article is regarding about 'The Effective Leadership of Self-managing Work Teams'. This topic is presented on the week 8 and 10 in our unit guide with the title 'Individuals and Groups' and "Leadership". In the textbook this topic is presented in the chapter 14 and chapter 16 which come from part 5 'Leading'.
Referring to the article, the main arguments presented by the authors is that external leader behaviors do support to the self-managing work team success. Their objective is also to increase the understanding of the role of external leader who is the leader to whom a team reports to. Self-managing work team are natural work groups where they work together to perform a task. They take on management into their works where each of them performs as a supervisors and managers. According to the article, leading a team that manages itself will need a distinctive approach of leadership. They carry out more responsible with more complex and demanding roles than the traditional team leadership. For the traditional team leadership they are more expected to lead by monitoring and managing those teams while the external leaders are expected to lead by monitoring and managing back to their teams. Subsequently, boundary spanning activities where external leader need to interact with various organizations who supply the team with resources and support is very essential to determine their success in that role. (Druskat and Wheeler, 2003: 435; Robbins, Bergman, Stagg and Coulter, 2003: 737) In order to be effective leader in the self-managing work teams which is also known as self-directed work teams, they must know how to influence a team and others in an organization. For instance, their ability to persuade their team members to listen, talk and accept advice will be much more advantage to them as a leader. Secondly, they ought to know how and with whom to build relationships which involve networking especially with their subordinates. There are times when self-management team need the leader to seek and scout for information too because when they do not receive the information there are the risk of becoming over bounded. Thus, ability of the leader to scout and share the information is very important as it will facilitate team self-management and the effectiveness. In self-management team they are expected to have their own decisions. Here is when external leaders...