Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

equired level, or not. It does not matter who did what, or why something took place or not. All
members of the team win together or fail together.
There is no such thing, as ‘everyone has to do his own job’. Members of a team together do the
job. They may have different roles and functions, fixed or changing, and they must have clear
responsibilities for everyone at any given moment – but the main personal responsibility is to do
whatever is needed for the team as a whole to win. Helping others in a team is not doing someone
else’s job. It is the job of everyone to help others. Doing something extra or something that was not
initially planned is not considered doing an additional job – it is part of the main job, because it is
necessary.
All members of the team depend on each another. Trust and mutual support is not a matter of
morale; it is a matter of survival – for everyone in the team and for the team as a whole. The one
who is not trustworthy and not supportive to others cannot be a member of the team. If trust and
mutual support are not present in a group of people – they will never become a team and obtain
corresponding emergent features. However, that can only happen in a situation where these
people can afford not to be a team. And it can happen only if the organization allows them to do
so.
A group becomes a team when the existence and wellbeing of participants is determined by the
common final result, which depends not merely on the sum of individual efforts, but on the
interaction of all members in a common process to accomplish certain objectives or implement a
certain mission.
A team becomes a self-organizing entity when the team itself defines its internal structure,
procedures and rules, distribution of jobs and awards, and all current tasks. This self-determination
is built upon mutual agreement, based on available knowledge and resources, and focused to the
common final result of operating as a team.
A self-organizing team becomes high performing - in a process of permanent learning and
optimization of its activities - when the balance is reached between the structure and functioning of
the team on one side, and the conditions that encourage survival in the environment on the other
side.
The literature on the topic more or less follows this sequence: group – team – self-managed team -
high-performing team (see, for example, a very comprehensive book of Dale E. Yeatts and Clod
Hyten, ‘High-Performing Self-Managed Work Teams’). In the author’s opinion, however, any team
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