Teams are a special form of task group that have become increasingly popular.
7
In the
sense used here, a
team
is a group of workers that functions as a unit, often with little or
no supervision, to carry out work-related tasks, functions, and activities. Table 13.1 lists
and defines some of the various types of teams that are being used today. Earlier forms
of teams included autonomous work groups and quality circles. Today, teams are also
sometimes called
self-managed teams
,
cross-functional teams
, or
high-performance teams
.
Many firms today are routinely using teams to carry out most of their daily operations.
8
Further,
virtual teams
—teams composed of people from remote work sites who work
together online—are also becoming more and more common.
9
Organizations create teams for a variety of reasons. For one thing, they give more
responsibility for task performance to the workers who are actually performing the
tasks. They also empower workers by giving them greater authority and decision-
making freedom. In addition, they allow the organization to capitalize on the knowledge
and motivation of their workers. Finally, they enable the organization to shed its bureau-
cracy and promote flexibility and responsiveness. Ford used teams to design its newest
of crowdsourcing. Although the practice of asking a
crowd for help is as old as the wanted posters on
post office walls, the web has expanded this concept
greatly because it can connect people anywhere in the
world who want to be involved. Many newer business
models are built on their ability to provide platforms
for participation. Many people use crowdsourced
Wikipedia as their only encyclopedia and the customer
recommendations provided by Amazon, TripAdvisor,
OpenTable, and Yelp as their guide for what to read
and where to go, eat, or shop.
In the simplest form of crowdsourcing, a group is
assembled, usually online, to solve a problem or engi-
neer a solution. One classic illustration is described by
Tapscott and Williams in their book
Wikinomics
.
They write of a struggling Canadian gold mining firm,
Goldcorp, that decided to release all its proprietary geo-
logical data about its property to the public and offered a
$575 000 prize for anyone who could develop a better
way to locate gold on that property. The winning team
from Australia gave them an answer that enabled them
to increase their production of gold from just over 50,000
ounces annually at a cost of $360 an ounce to over a half
million ounces annually at a cost of only $59 an ounce.
Successful examples of crowdsourcing like this one
have generated much interest among others seeking
solutions to problems that traditional methods don’t
seem to solve well. By building a web platform and
posing a problem in a way that will interest potential
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