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Communal-Rational Authority, Control, and Self-Managing Teams: Implications for Leadership
Team Leadership and Eliminating Deviation
Self-discipline is the hardest function for the team to perform. The traditional supervior can discipline errant behavior much more easily than can a group of peers. Here, the team leader's key task is to get the team to confront the issue directly. That is, the leader has to persuade the team that they must acknowledge their need to discipline each other from time to time, and that they should reach consensus on a set of appropriate values and behavioral norms for disciplinary situations.Again, the path of least resistance is for the team to turn over disciplinary cases to the leader, or to adopt a set of draconian rules, niether of which work over the long term. The leader's first line of aciton is to prepare the team to deal with disciplinary situations. The leader's second line of action is to have had some traning in mediation (not conflict management) skills. A team leader can be very effective in playing the role of the "cooler head that prevails" in difficult disciplinary situations.
The team leader must be aware of another critical issue that falls into the realm of deviation elimination. Teams can easily get carried away with creating rational rules. Diverse teams face a natural tendency to create strong systems of rational rules (Barker, 1993), and these rules can be very useful for the team. However, these rational rules make the team vulneralbe to the pitfalls of any bureaucracy. The team can get bogged down by its own rules and find itself unable to easily change and adapt to new business situations.
More importantly, concertive control, with communal-rational authroity as its legitimizing agency, creates a very pwerful system of control. In the bureaucracy, authority rested with the system. Traditional authority rested with the patriarch. Charismatic authority rested with a particular person. Communal-rational authority rest with the peer pressure of the team - (Barker, 1993). The team controls itself. The team directs, monitors, and rewards or punishes itself. The team becomes very powerful, and the leader must ensure that the team exercises this power carefully. If not, the team environment can becomes a very oppressive place to work. When this happens a potentially fatal deviation has occurred that must be eliminated.
The leader must be able to recognize when the team is becoming bogged down by its rules and when the team environment is becoming oppressive. The team leader must be able to take some type of ocrrective action. As Hackman and Walton (1986) have suggested, the team periodically needs to review its norms and rules and evaluate how well they are working for the team. Leaders must faciliate this process, even at the expense of short-term productivity. Also, the leader must be able to turn to senior management for help if the team's system of control appears to be getting out of hand.
The team leader should not forget that eliminating deviation also means dispensing rewards. The leader should focus the team toward establishing its own system of recognizing outstanding behavior, even if senior management does not follow suit. The team needs a systemic mechanism for patting itself on the back.
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Reprinted with permission from James R. Barker