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Communal-Rational Authority, Control, and Self-Managing Teams: Implications for Leadership
Team Leadership and Directing
When viewed from the framework of communal-rational authority, the leader's responsibility for directing differs from the traditional managerial function of giving orders. The team can and should give itself orders based on its negotiated values and normative rules. The team leader's responsibility now becomes one of focusing and persuading. In the early stages of team development, the leader has to understand that the team needs to reach consensus on key values, and the leader should focus the team toward identifying what the team members velieve to be the elements of "doing good work on the teams." In later stages, the team leader must persuade the team to adopt norms and rules for dealing with recurring decisions or persistent problems, such as how to choose between competing customer demands and to hold themselves accountable to these rules.The essential requirement here is that the leader facilitates the team toward establishing parameters for its actions. In organizations of diverse members, we learn how to work togeither by creating an acceptable sense of order out of the chaos of competing goals and desires. This sense of order is a set of behavior parameters, such as value-based norms and rules. Examples of these parameters include the norm that all team members should be at work on time, the norm that the team will always build the "Acme" order first because Acme is the company's best customer, or the norm that the team will hold a 15 minute meeting each morning.
What the leader does here is not to give orders, but to direct the team toward discussing and setting these parameters. When the team is discussiong and setting parameters, it is, as the same time, reaching a consensus on values and establishing normative rules. If the team has value consensus and a set of normative rules, they can give themselves good orders.
But, the team leader must also face a very serious problem for the team: time management. Time is the biggest enemy of self-managing teams. The hectic pace of today's work environment means that the team will always be pressed for time. Unfortunately, "doing" teamwork demands much time and energy from the team members. And today's competitive business environment does not give time freely. The leader will be pressured to assume the role of traditional manager and give orders to the team.
The team will also find it easy to get carried away with making rules rather than taking the time to think through the necessity and usefulness of the rules. For example, a team that has a rule that everyone must come to work on time may tire of dealing with a few workers who are consistently tardy and, out of frustration, develop a very rigid, draconian rule governing tardiness, such as docking workder's a day's pay for bing a few minutes late. Taking this path of least resistance will only increase the number of complaints to the human resources department and ultimately degrade the team's performance.
In this situation, a team leader could help the team to see the problems associated with creating a powerfully constraining rule as a way out of a difficult situation. The leader also might faciliate the team in drawing up a corrective "contract" between the tardy workders and the team that provides a clear set or performance objectives and with an equally clear set of consequences for noncompliance. A contract such as this would address the specific situation and not force the team into creating an unnecessary and unwieldy general rule for tardiness.
When time pressures the team, the leader's skill is all the more important. The leader must keep the team focused on its values and ist useful rules. The leader must help the team to find the time that it needs to work effectively. That is all part of the leader's responsibility to direct the team toward its goals.
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Reprinted with permission from James R. Barker