Teams and Technology: : Fulfilling the Promise of the New Organization

Citation

Young, S. (1998), "Teams and Technology: : Fulfilling the Promise of the New Organization", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 299-301. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.1998.17.4.299.1

Teams and Technology is a guide to integrating teams and technology for improved team and organizational performance. Based on the authors’ research and experience in over 100 organizations, Teams and Technology shows how to develop new information systems that support collaborative work, how to build teams that take advantage of technological potential and, most importantly, how to create an organization with a structure and policies that support the synergy of teams and technology. The book has the prime target readership of managers, consultants and human resource professionals.

Many organizations are struggling with teams and new IT. While there is often a strong belief that each can offer great promise, fulfilling that promise can often prove frustratingly difficult. A major reason for many IT systems failing is a lack of attention paid to human and organizational issues. Systems design is often led by engineers with little knowledge of human and organizational factors and it is evident that IT system design should use many of the same principles that organizational psychologists use in designing and implementing changes in organizational practice

There are of course a number of excellent books on creating effective teams ‐ J. Richard Hackman’s Groups that Work (and those that Don’t) or, more recently, Michael West’s Effective Teamwork, and a few on implementing information systems ‐ Richard Walton’s Up and Running for example. Publications on the human and organizational aspects of information technology however are largely seen in ergonomics or specialist journals such as Behaviour and Information Technology, rather than in the mainstream occupational and organizational publications.

Teams and Technology provides a pragmatic perspective on how to change organizations by integrating the design and implementation of teams and new technologies. A framework is developed by the authors ‐ mutual design and implementation (MDI) ‐ for the integrated design and implementation of team, technological and organizational change. If teamwork is the key to effective organizations, then information is argued to be the key to effective teamwork, the contribution of the two to knowledge and organizational performance being argued to be greater than the sum of the parts. The authors’ premiss certainly supports research we are currently undertaking at the Safety Research Unit, Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool (unpublished), which identifies information sharing and cognitive processes as a central element to team functioning. With this in mind I looked forward to what could be a useful contribution to the field.

The book is in four parts. Part one introduces the concept of using teams and IT to effect organizational change, and offers a fair, if somewhat pedestrian, definition of the authors’ use of terms, such as teams. Part two focuses on the design of the project team which is to oversee the organizational change (the “MDI team”) and looks at who should be involved in the MDI process. After an overly lengthy introduction, we arrive at the heart of the book. Part three describes how the MDI process unfolds. The MDI team begins by addressing where the organizational change project fits into the organization’s strategy and structure and what the project’s overall objectives are, then decides on a particular design strategy to pursue. This involves the mutual design and development of the technology and teams. An incremental process of integrating this design into the ongoing work flow of the organization is then begun. Frequently interventions such as these flounder because of a failure of the organization to adapt the changes and to provide long‐term commitment and support. Part four examines how higher level policies, behaviours and strategies must also change to support team and technology changes. The changes required in human resource departments, corporate information technology departments and senior management are covered. The book concludes with a vision of emerging organizational forms freed from such traditional constraints as time, place, authority, function, and formal organizational boundaries. The ability to acquire knowledge and learn, the authors argue, will be the competitive advantage of the organization of the future.

The book provides a good, practical synthesis of current thinking on organizational concepts and IT and clearly reflects the authors’ wide experience in the field. By integrating the mutual design and implementation of teams the authors have made a valuable and timely contribution and have highlighted an area to which organizations need to be increasingly attuned. Beyond this however the book is not particularly radical, offering no major new insights for experts or academics in the field of organizational development or teamworking. Unfortunately the authors missed the opportunity of making a significant contribution by failing to explore in greater depth the role of information sharing and knowledge for effective teamwork, the nature of cognitive processes within teams, and how they relate to improved organizational performance.

Nevertheless, this pragmatic and clearly written book provides good coverage of the area, even with the bias towards US literature and relative lack of reference to European work, and will prove useful for managers and consultants new to the area. Most usefully the book includes recommendations on how to manage such complex change. However, the recommendations are sometimes rather general and somewhat buried in the discussion which does not make for easy reference. Replacing the annoying hypothetical story running through the book with key points and recommendations would have proved more effective. Those who will benefit most from the book will be IT engineers with little experience or knowledge of the concepts of organizational psychology, or those who had never thought of following them when implementing new IT systems. Integrating IT systems design with organizational development techniques is something progressive organizations cannot afford to neglect. This book provides a useful framework to guide that process.