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Communal-Rational Authority, Control, and Self-Managing Teams: Implications for Leadership
Team Leadership and Monitoring
The monitoring function requires that the leader facilitate the team's ability to supervise itself. The team has to establish its own system of checks and balances as a means of monitoring its own work activity. As a start, the leader should ensure that the teams members reach consensus on their values for self-monitoring and that they establish a set of norms that pertain to evaluation their own effectiveness.The team leader may help establish a formula for the team to confirm that all the members undertand the goals and directions of the team, such as having a few team members brief back the decisions made at a team meeting to the rest of the group. The team leader may facilitate a regular feedback session with senior management and the team to evaluate the team's performance.
When the pressures of daily business life swell, senior management will apply their own path of least resistance that short-circuits concertive control. They may direct their communication, especially in terms of monitoring, to the team leader. A senior manager may use the excuse, "I've got 10 teams to worry about. I don't have tiem to talk to the whole team, so I want to talk to the team leaders." When this hapens, the team leader tends to take on more and more responsibility, such as filling out a weekly report on customer orders shipped. Gradually, the tam leader will assume more and more of the traditional supervisory role, which means that the team's leadership will not be in synch with its base of communal-rational authority.
The team leader has to resist this pressure to assume the traditional first-line supervisor role, and senior management has to be supportive. The team leader must keep the team focused on creating and implementing their own systems of monitoring (including confirming and evaluation activities). Keeping the team focused on their need to self-monitor and self-evaluate is the key to achieving this control function.
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Reprinted with permission from James R. Barker