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Rebecca A. Proehl: Associate Professor and Chairperson, Management Department, Saint Mary's College, Moraga, California, USA
Introduction
Major changes are occurring in the US workplace. One of the most noticeable is that organizations increasingly use teams as a way of problem solving, fostering quality and productivity and, in some instances, managing entire operations. Carson (1992) reported that eight out of ten organizations in the USA with 100 or more employees have assigned employees to working groups identified as teams. In organizations with 10,000 or more employees, the figure is closer to 90 per cent.
Teams have existed in organizational settings for many years. Individuals coming together with varying skills and experiences to perform work and solve problems have long been a feature of organizational life (Barnard, 1938) and focus of study (Olmsted, 1959). The present urgency in understanding team functioning derives however, from the accelerating magnitude and importance of teams in modern organizations. Katzenbach and Smith (1993), contend that teams are in fact, the primary unit of performance in organizations because managers alone can no longer deal with the complexities of organizational life: "The performance challenges that face large companies in every industry demand the kind of responsiveness, speed, on-line customization, and quality that is beyond the reach of individual performance" (p. 5).
As teams have become more prevalent in the workplace, they have become also more varied in terms of their purpose, structure and function. One example of a variation in team structure is the cross-functional team which recognizes that "on many projects the relevant team includes persons outside the functional unit ... The criterion is still the same - identifying those persons who are interdependently related in the successful accomplishment of the task" (French and Bell, 1990, p. 141). It is estimated that of the employees who are members of teams, 30 per cent are assigned to temporary project teams and 18 per cent are members of long-term cross-functional teams (Gordon, 1992).
While the natural work group has been extensively studied since Elton Mayo's classic work, the cross-functional team has not been the focus of much empirical research. Indeed, many practitioners assume that the team basics are the same for the natural work group, self-managed team, temporary project group, or long-term cross-functional team and...