Purpose: Technology uncertainty poses significant challenges to manufacturers, as rapid changes in product and/or process standards and specifications can disrupt the smooth flow of materials in extended supply chains. Practitioners and researchers alike who take a relational perspective widely...

Purpose – The literature on supply chain management has focused on the benefits of frequent and strategic communication in supply chains. However, it has paid much less attention to the difficulties and conflicts associated with day‐to‐day communications in supply chains. This discrepancy...

An increased level of self‐organization, particularly in autonomous work teams, is widely believed to be a necessary part of a successful firm and a factor in many modern restructuring initiatives. This article investigates the limitations of self‐organized groups and surveys these...

This article presents a study among information technology (IT) companies and young IT professionals, which demonstrates the central role of career development and strategic training policies in improving the match between demand for and supply of IT professionals. These policies seem to be able...

This paper deals with the leeway organizations have to develop and design self‐managing teams by using a model containing four modal verbs: must, may, can and will. “Must” refers to the need for local decision making and is considered to be the result of diversity in environmental demand...

Several human factors in the present and prospective situation of an automotive assembly shop were examined with respect to the concepts of lean production (LP) and sociotechnical systems. The work organization was evaluated by means of four principles: of “minimal critical specification”...

From a contingency perspective and by using the principles of self‐organization described by Morgan (1986), this essay relates the amount of variety in transactions and transformations to the requisite of self‐organization. Self‐organization is defined in terms of the local autonomy to...

Purpose – Teams are often introduced with the objective of improving the effectiveness of the organization, as well as the quality of working life for employees. This immediately makes clear that constructs in teamwork research may refer to completely different variables depending on the level...

Based on the four principles of self‐organization formulated by Morgan (1986), a four‐stage implementation model for empowering teams was developed. From the first to the last stage, the attention shifts from routine tasks to non‐routine tasks, from the individual to the group, and from...