The Self-Managing Organization : How Leading Companies Are Transforming the Work of Teams for Real Impact. This item is unavailable.The Self-Managing Organization : How Leading Companies Are Transforming the Work of Teams for Real Impact

Based on the principles of "Participative Design," the authors explain why employees' participation is the key to successful corporate reorganization and present detailed case studies of major companies in which employees design and manage their own workplaces.

Using principles and methods drawn from case studies of such companies as American Express, Hewlett Packard, and Motorola, Purser and Cabana offer a blueprint for designing the self-managing organization. It is written for executives, middle managers, and frontline supervisors in all types of businesses participating in the new knowledge economy, which is dependent on knowledgeable workers. The book provides a set of tools that can be used at all levels of an organization to transform rigid bureaucracies into flexible work systems, with self-managing work groups serving as the basic building block. The authors explain and demonstrate how organizations can create social learning contexts, or "44 communities of trust," where people can engage in open dialogue and chart the future while redesigning their own work. The authors are consultants in the field of organizational behavior. They contend that their theories are not just another fad but essential to growth and profitability in the new corporate reality, where knowledge workers are the essential core of corporate activity. Mary Whaley