1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Some good ideas, August 28, 2008
This review is from: Designing Team-Based Organizations: New Forms for Knowledge Work (Jossey-Bass Management) (Hardcover)
Designing Team-Based Organizations is a book with a more exciting title than content... though, the book is pretty good. It's not written in a very engaging style. Also the authors seem to have some assumptions about how to design new organizations which seemed weird to me.
The book consists of three parts. The first part is an introduction to teams and to the book. The second part talks about designing new organizations and the third part covers some implementation concerns.
The first two chapters provide an introduction in the rest of the book (and are probably two of the more interesting chapters). The first chapter covers different models of thinking about organizations and also introduces the three step model for designing organizations (basically: research, design, implement). The second chapter covers different organizations, teams and starts exploring how team-based organizations look like.
The second part has chapters called "Step one, Step two" etc. This is what bothered me most about the book. It suggested that you just follow five steps in designing a new organization and then just implement it (which is just one chapter). I got the impression that the authors were ONLY researchers and have never actually worked in or with organizations (though, they say they did research in organizations). Anyways..
The first step is to identify the teams. The second to discuss interteam issues and find ways for teams to work together. Interestingly enough, the authors seemed to be of opinion that management needs to create this structure more than the teams need to... (do the authors also have a traditional mindset?) Step three clarifies roles of management and roles of teams. Step four focuses on integration with the rest of the organization and... Step five on managing performance. This chapter contains some interesting info on different HR systems and is certainly worth reading.
Part three are *other* chapters that clarify issues. The first clarifies the different skill needs for teams and how this can be reached. The next (ninth) chapter talks about the concept of *empowerment*. The authors are of the opinion that the word is misused and want to clarify what they mean by this word. Some of the chapter is pretty good. The next chapter talks about different IT support. Though important, I found this chapter boring. Then with 40 pages left in the book, the authors move to "the implementation" and talk about different ways of transitioning to team-based organizations and in the last chapter, summarize the challenges. Interestingly, the book ends with a couple pages for researchers on what they think are future areas for research.
I was excited about the book when I started, though I had trouble finishing it (a bad sign). The writing was fairly dry and hard to follow. Some chapters were excellent, some chapters were boring (different authors wrote different chapters?). I was annoyed by the assumptions of the authors about the three simple steps of organizational design. This didn't seem to be equal to my reality. The authors did point that out, but still insist to structure their work like that. Also, the authors warn about traditional assumptions and yet they seem to have lots of traditional assumptions also related to the roles of management compared to teams. Management is responsible for planning and designing the organizations, there was very little to suggest that the actual teams should be involved in the design...
Anyways, I did enjoy the book and learned some new things from it. I was going for four stars, but the last three chapters ruined it and I switched to three stars. This book is worth reading only if you are very interested in the subject. If you are looking for more general team books, then this is probably not the right book.
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