The Role of Management in Production Units with Autonomous Work Groups

Claims that the most important demands on managers in sociotechnical organized systems with more or less autonomous work groups are generally that they must have a basic trust in their subordinates and their capacity and development potential, that they must be able to set goals for the activities within the groups and let the group members be responsible for the fulfilment of the production target and thus give up exercising a detailed control over the job procedure, and that they must realize the necessity to provide the group members with all kinds of basic data which are needed for the decision making within the group. At the transition from a traditional to a group‐based organization, the manager must display a real commitment as change agent during the whole implementation period.