Author: Craig Freese

Team Empowerment
Powering Up Teams Bradley L. Kirkman & Benson Rosen
A well-known and commonly accepted belief is that teams can accomplish more than the sum of their individual members efforts.(p. 434). This principle holds for musical, sports, and work teams. Work team members accomplish synergy, and make one another better in their endeavors towards interdependent goals. Research suggests that a key component tied to team synergy and effectiveness is team empowerment. Authors Kirkman and Rosen have identified four traits of empowered teams: autonomy, impact, meaningfulness, and potency. Autonomy is a shared experience of empowered teams, and is more simply known as self-management. A self-managed team has freedom, control, and the ability to make important decisions. Autonomy is only one characteristic of team empowerment; alone it does not equate to empowerment. Self-managing teams experience a strong level of employee engagement and satisfaction. Teams like to feel they are in-charge of their own turf and control all aspects from HR responsibilities, like hiring and compensation, to typical middle-management tasks such as resource allocation. This sense of responsibility and power strengthens team members commitments to one another, leading to synergies. Autonomy is a necessary part of team empowerment, but studies show that its benefit is on employee satisfaction, and alone has minimal relation to team effectiveness. A key component of empowerment, according to Kirkman and Rosen, is the ability for a team to see the fruits of its labors, or organizational impact. The authors found that, team members who did experience a sense of impact getting feedback made their work

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more important. (p.435). Employees want to know how their efforts affect both stakeholders inside and outside of the company. The feedback they receive helps drive the teams feeling of pride and importance in their daily work. Teams require a sense of meaningfulness, so that team members build a strong commitment to their mission and purpose. A team that shares meaningfulness has, an intrinsic caring about their tasks. see their goals as valuable and worthwhile. (p. 434). It does not matter what the individual employees tasks actually are, from mundane assembly line operations to rocket science or brain surgery. The team and employees can still find their importance to larger objectives. The feeling of such job responsibility and importance leads to pride, and team experience of: ordinary tasks in an extraordinary way.(p.435). The fourth characteristic of team empowerment suggested by the authors research is a team experience of potency. A potent team contains members who exhibit selfconfidence and conviction even cockiness in their ability. This attitude is manifested in body language, speeches, presentations, and self-image. Members of a potent team are attached to, and supportive of, one another. This type of team seems to strip away individuality and finger pointing for a collective culture. The authors find that in order for work teams to maintain empowerment there must be realignment in four organization levers. These include: leader roles, production and service responsibilities, human resource management policies, and the social structure within the organization. The leadership style of each team needs to change to a coach/facilitator approach who gives ample freedom to the team to operate on its own terms. The team must be given

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its space, and needs power to act on day-to-day responsibilities. Effective leaders will set the bar high on expectations and hold the team accountable for its execution of the goals. The production or service responsibilities must be pushed out to the team itself. Teams should work towards setting their own standards and policy, as well as handling quality control. The team should handle appropriate employee task assignments and manage communication with the customers. Finally a team should be involved in creating an entire product, or the whole service delivery process to see the work end-to-end. Humans Resources should be a key component to the work teams functions. In order to create the empowered team desired, it is important to stress, team goals have a higher priority than individual ones. (p. 442). To do this means the team will need to adapt to compensation and performance review changes. Peers should evaluate one another on the team, and salary and rewards should closely match the outcomes and successes of the entire work team. Additionally personnel activities, like interviews, should be performed by members of the team to give the team a say in who joins them and will be a good fit for the team. Finally the social structure will need to be adjusted to bolster a team empowerment ideal. Easy access to information is critical; sharing inside the organization should be upstream and downstream, but also between teams as well. Teams must have ample resources and support from other work teams throughout the organization. Employees need frequent opportunity to talk and collaborate with members from all other teams.

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