Evolution and Stages of Development of Self-Managed teams Essay

One of the most effective means of extracting the unutilized portion of the healthcare industry has been the self-managed team. This has been a recently identified area, and healthcare organizations are beginning to use it for their advantage in improving the health outcomes of the patients. Self-managed teams are also known as ‘self-directed teams’, ‘natural teams’, or ‘semiautonomous teams’. They are a group of employees that have to do daily responsibilities along with managing themselves. They would perform several tasks including managing work responsibilities, planning, problem solving, decision-making, scheduling the work, etc. The self-management teams would be having several characteristics including interacting with other working groups, responsibility providing the services, performing interdependent activities and managing the operations of the team (Schrubb, 1992 & Silverman, 1996). The basic evolution of a self-managed team occurs in five stages. Zawacki and Norman framed this in the year 1994. With a different situation arising due to the workflow, the team can revert to an earlier situation. A self-managed team would be having several roles to play with relation to patient care, and each of these roles would be in one of the seven stages of development. It is important to note that each of these roles played by the team members, would be in any of the seven stages of team development. The stages of self-managed team development include: – In the first stage, when the team is new and do not know the skills and the knowledge of the work, a leader who is familiar with the work processes and competent with the work skills, would be providing supervision and would train the staff to perform the daily tasks. The leader once actually trains the staff members to perform the tasks, slowly shifts his role from a supervisor to a manager. He would now be slowly managing the activities of the team. Slowly the manager would begin to coordinate all the activities of the team. He/she would be training the staff members to perform tasks that would involve leading the lower staff members. Most of the members of the team take up certain responsibilities concerned with management. The manager acts as an interface between the self-managed team and the administration or the portfolio management. Slowly the manager of the team becomes an additional resource that would not only perform the tasks that the members of the group would be performing, but would also be invoked in interacting with the administration (Silverman, 1996). It is important that the organization moves thought all these stages in the self-management development process. The specific reasons for having a self-management development process include: – To ensure that the patient is satisfied with the treatment To ensure that the team members get the feedback directly from the customers rather than from the managers and the supervisors. This would help the team to continuously develop over a period of time. The customer satisfaction levels would improve with time. To ensure that further responsibilities and roles for the staff members are incorporated in an appropriate manner. The organization, which has dynamic objectives, is able to function better if self-managed teams are existent. The managers and the supervisors, who play an important role guiding the staff members, can be utilized to engage in growth-related activities of the origination (Silverman, 1996).