A Participative Design for Dispersed Employees in Turbulent Environments

Abstract

Approaches to sociotechnical redesign of work organization have concentrated on developing self-managing teams, using direct task interdependences as the basis for redesign. However, situations exist where it is extremely difficult to redesign work organization in this way. They arise when individuals are linked only indirectly through their separate contributions to organizational performance. Hence, in order to increase organizational effectiveness and employee satisfaction in turbulent environments, new designs for participation and collaboration must be found which do not depend on creating self-managing work teams. The experience reported here suggests that the "core management group" concept is an effective mechanism not only for employee participation in management decision-making, but also for increasing their ability to respond to change and uncertainly affecting their immediate work situations.

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