Reference:Principles of STS Analysis and Design/Structuring Work Groups

The Planning Table

What kind of design process has been created here? A group of managers and union leaders discussed the future of work in their organization. A manager, in charge of hundreds of employees who maintain and operate systems worth many billions said, " I am not at the planning table" as did another, whose domain was technological innovation. Subsequently it became apparent, from field studies, that this feeling of powerlessness with respect to the future was common across many levels of the firm. Engineering bureaucracies were busy inflicting technological change without reference to each other's efforts or to their effects on management, supervision, unions, or the jobs of employees. To the observer, there was no 'planning table'.

A second firm, intent on achieving employee involvement, union collaboration, and a new ethos in a new billion dollar advanced manufacturing facility, pursued an STS design process replete with union involvement in committees, task forces, and the steering committee. The engineering functions, however, were quite unwilling to share power among themselves, let alone with management or unions. In spite of prodigious efforts in task forces and committees, here too, there was no 'planning table'.

These first two sets of principles seek to create an effective 'planning table'; a process capable of addressing the complex challenges of innovative workplace design. Value clarification, in a design team representing stakeholders, should create a shared sense of the future enabling collaboration. The acceptance of uncertainty implies necessary human roles in system functioning because engineered solutions cannot be complete. It assures that concrete technical problems will be on the table and within the authority of the design team. It legitimates future adaptability and learning as requirements for organizational effectiveness. The notions of technological and organizational choice make emphatic that the joined domains require concurrent design establishing the design agenda. The rejection of technological determinism emancipates work design from exclusively engineering criteria. The concept of open sociotechnical systems further elaborates the agenda by requiring the consideration of stakeholder objectives, environmental issues, and organizational functioning.

The recognition of work as fundamentally problem-solving and creative activity clarifies the key roles of individuals and groups, too often overlooked. In essence, groups of employees are posited as preferable to hierarchies in managing uncertainties and challenges. Compatibility enables participants to gain knowledge and experience in adapting design to such challenges.

Participative design is both end and means. Participative design is already innovative establishing the virtue of people influencing the definition and allocation of their work activities. Participation assures legitimacy for present and future adaptive decisions.

However, the intentions of this process are likely to be defeated if common design practices of over design and prior specification are not critically questioned. Minimum critical specification assures a sphere of meaningful choice both for designers and members of the future organization and a domain for future adaptive action. Constraint free design sets an ideal standard to evaluate and guide design decisions and drives the design team towards meaningful innovations by freeing the process from the dictates of past practice. The assertion of human values requires the testing of design choices against the aspirations and expectations of employees and not simply technical or economic considerations.

These principles do not constitute instructions or a recipe but a list of issues to be addressed by a design team. Together, they can constitute a 'planning table' shared by managers, engineers and systems analysts, employees and their unions. There follow three sets of principles that relate to the content of design decisions.

Structuring Work Groups

The next seven principles deal with the structure of the work group and its relationship with the organizational environment. They set up the conditions for a work team to become a viable unit of self management in an organization.

Principle 11: Self-Regulating Work Groups

The self-regulating work group is the building block of the organization. Design work groups rather than individual jobs.

The basic building block of the organization is a self regulating work group (SRWG) (Cummings, 1978; Susman, 1976) otherwise described as self-maintaining organizational unit (Davis, 1982), self designing organization (Cummings and Mohrman, 1987), self-steering work group (Gulowsen, 1979), autonomous work group (Herbst, 1962), or simply team. The object of the design process is a self-regulating work group with the capability to achieve organizational objectives under a variety of conditions while maintaining its internal structure and adapting to changing demands (Davis, 1982). Within a SRWG, individual work roles shift in content in response to emerging challenges. To preserve this adaptive capacity, the inclinations of design teams to specify individual job content must be held in check.

The principle is too emphatically asserted above. There are many alternatives to hierarchies (Herbst, 1976). But STS practice usually calls for group designs rather than individual jobs. Kelly's (1978) perceptive critique of STS theory dismisses the concept of 'organizational choice' promulgated by the Tavistock group (Trist, Higgin, Murray, and Pollock, 1963) because of this singular outcome of STS design. The principle of 'choice' was an argument those who insisted that technical considerations mandate fragmented work and individual jobs.

The primary implication of SRWG design is that we should avoid designing individual jobs. Individual job design is a traditional means of direct control through the fragmentation of work into tasks that can be readily supervised.

Principle 12: Work Group Responsible Autonomy

The work group takes responsibility for its productive outcomes. Work group autonomy is constrained by the requirement that it be used to improve organizational performance and effectiveness.

The self-regulating work group is granted considerable autonomy and takes responsibility for the achievement of organizational goals. Implicitly, the unit of performance control is the work group rather than the individual. Although this would appear self-evident, it is the converse that makes this point so important. Emery (1979) found that the application of industrial engineering methods to job design rests on a critical social assumption:that it must be possible for each individual worker to be held responsible by an external supervisor for his individual performance. (Emery, 1979 p.88)

Direct individual control is a traditional work design criteria. The essence of the principle of group responsibility is to liberate individuals from external supervision. Discipline, maintained by peers within a group, can be more demanding and more effective than external supervision and is generally less onerous (Emery, 1979).

This principle, implicitly, argues for work group rather than individual measures of performance. Organizational coordination is to be achieved by outcome standards rather than direct supervision or work standards (Mintzberg, 1983). Davis and Wacker (1982) suggest that work group autonomy is enabled when there are definite criteria for performance evaluation, timely feedback is possible, and the group has the resources to measure and control its own performance.

The principle explicitly calls for work group autonomy. Kelly (1978) and Susman (1976) argue that work group autonomy is limited by the requirement that the group use it to achieve the economic goals of the organization; to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Within those constraints, many of the group's needs may be met. Emery confirms this view in his discussion of the Volvo Kalmar plant:

If a semi-autonomous work group is not willing to exercise control and co-ordination over its members then the design of flow lines must go back to the traditional model. (Emery, 1979)

Kelly (1978) goes on to argue that STS design increases the exploitation of workers, intensifying their work to produce better economic results. Autonomy, like QWL, is relative. The author's interviews at a plant designed on the basis of STS principles (Berniker, 1985) found a recurrent theme among workers. They feared that they could never return to work in a traditional factory. The freedom, they experienced, was too significant. The same theme appeared in interviews at the much discussed Gaines Pet Food (now Quaker Oats) plant in Topeka after 17 years of operation.

From a purely Marxist perspective, critical theorists should accept this limitation on autonomy . Marx argues that the driving force in history is the ongoing development of the means of production. Work organization innovations that do not improve organizational effectiveness cannot survive. A historical cusp has been passed where the further fragmentation of work and restriction of worker autonomy no longer results in productive advantages. Responsible autonomy has become a better means of production.

Principle 13: Inducements to Work

The primary inducements to work are necessity and pay.

In a market economy, the primary inducement to work is necessity, the income required to sustain families and self. Individuals, no less than organizations, function in economic environments that require the creation of value to gain the resources to survive. This direct outcome of the free market relationship is often forgotten in the motivation literature and by many consultants. How often has QWL and workplace innovation been presented, at least implicitly, as an alternative to bargaining relationships? How often have these techniques been used as a means to dislodge labor unions? It may be controversial, but respect for the nature of a market economy and the employment relationship require this explicit recognition of economic necessities.

When organizational performance improves as an outcome of STS designs and participative management, there arises an expectation that employees will benefit accordingly. Gainsharing, proposed as a means to link performance to economic rewards (Bullock and Bullock, 1982), remains a problematic issue for designers of participative work systems (Bullock and Lawler, 1984) although more recent work argues that it contributes to organizational effectiveness (Lawler,1986). Kelly (1978) points out the close relationship between success of many STS innovations and increased wages.

Principle 14: Boundary Location

Boundaries should be drawn to permit a self-regulatory decision making within the work group.

A crucial design decision is the boundary of the work group which significantly influences its capacity for self-regulation and control of technical system disturbances. There are many bases for boundary determination. Unfortunately, both existing organization charts and technical system designs may reflect boundary assumptions that inhibit effective team functioning and problem solving.

The conditions for self-regulation include technologically required cooperation (Susman, 1976) or interdependencies within the group, task differentiation or the grouping of functions in boundable wholes, boundary control or influence over group boundary crossing transactions (Cummings, 1978) and access to the sources of disturbances and variances that require human intervention (Berniker, 1987). Clear group boundaries enable autonomy (Davis and Wacker,1982). All of these depend on boundary decisions that subdivide productive processes among work groups.

The principle further implies that the group will have access to the information needed for control responses and measurement of its performance. Boundaries should enable members to develop face-to-face relationships necessary for effective group functioning. The boundaries should define a group of sufficient size to have the requisite response variety needed to execute the work, to control and maintain the technical and social systems within the boundary, and to incorporate administrative functions in the group's role. External controls should be minimized as the group increasingly coordinates its own activities.

Principle 15: Boundary Management

The regulation of the interface between work teams and their organizational environments is a crucial role of management and the work group.

The success of a work place innovation depends on the management of its interface with the rest of the organization. This boundary management role is usually the primary task of supervisors and managers (Davis, 1982) but can become a domain of work group action (Susman, 1976). As self-regulation evolves, the focus of managerial attention should be shifted from internal activities to external relations. These relations may be with a variety of organizational stakeholders including upper management, other departments, staff functions, and external bodies. The goal of management is to assure access to those resources needed by work teams to achieve organizational goals.

Work groups need a lengthy period to evolve their coping abilities. They must be sheltered, for a time, from challenges and disturbances by the rest of the organization. Designers must attend to this need so that self-regulating work groups enjoy the sanction, support, and protection by organizational stakeholders.

Principle 16: Joint Optimization

The functioning of the technical system and the social system should be considered conjointly when evaluating design choices.

Traditional design practice has been to engineer the best technical system possible within a budget and later assemble a work force to operate it. The resulting technical system optimization coupled with a lack of explicit social system consideration leads to suboptimization for the organization as a whole. Engineers are not trained or qualified to design organizations to optimally operate their technical systems. Joint optimization requires that the criterion of effective functioning of the productive organization be placed ahead of mechanical technical system optima.

Therefore, when considering specific design decisions, the impacts on both technical systems and social organization must be considered. For example, the control rooms of a petrochemical plant with several products may be dispersed across a plant in proximity to their processes. Alternatively, they may be concentrated in a single area. The latter would support the functioning of a single operating team. Dispersion would make teamwork very difficult. The technical system cost differential may be small.

The principle may be mislabeled. We do not actually optimize such designs in the classic sense of that term. The goal of design is not a unique optimum so much as an adaptive organization capable of sustained improvement and viability in the face of environmental challenges.

Principle 17: Organizational Uniqueness

Honor each organizations uniqueness. Each organization should invent itself.

Each organization is sufficiently unique that it should design itself, its component units, and their functioning rather than attempt to copy what others have done (Davis, 1982). The complexity of innovative design processes is great reflecting changing values, differing organizational strategies, specific technological and technical system challenges, and the unique needs and expectations of individuals. It cannot be captured or understood by observing the outcomes of others. Copying innovations does not develop adaptive capacity and flexible response capability. Nor does it provide the clarification and testing of values necessary to support the innovation over its lengthy period of experimentation and learning.

Having said this, there is much to be learned from other organizations. Exploration and observation of other innovative organizations extends design horizons and broadens the scope of creative design. It delineates possibilities beyond the vision of people whose only organizational experience is in traditional hierarchical organizations.

Principle 18: Support Congruence - Reinforcement

Organizational systems of social support should be designed to reinforce the behaviors that the innovation is designed to elicit. (Cherns, 1976)

A self-regulating work group (SRWG) is not an island but an integral part of a larger organization. The policies of the organization, adapted to traditional jobs and supervision, may conflict with the kinds of behavior needed for SRWG success. Therefore, we must seek congruence between the functioning of the support systems and the intended structure of the work group.

Payment systems, performance measurement, career advancement, selection, training, conflict resolution, promotion and many other policies and practices of an organization can either reinforce or undermine team functioning and coherence. Each organizational practice should be reviewed to see whether it reinforces or contradicts the intended functioning of work teams.

Pay for knowledge reward systems (Gupta, Jenkins, Curington, 1986; Lawler, 1988; Pasmore, 1988) are an example of congruence. Increased knowledge and competence enhance a team's adaptive capacity. Career paths based on skill acquisition support learning and cooperation within teams (Davis and Sullivan, 1980).