Effective Teamwork Group Assignment: Digitech Case Study Custom Essay

Digitech is a manufacturer of portable electronic devices based in the East Midlands. For most of its 18-year history, the medium-sized company reflected a traditional functional organisational structure whereby each area (e.g., manufacturing, finance, marketing) reported directly to the CEO, Jack Fisher, and his senior management executives, Laura and Simon. The company had been experiencing steady growth for many years, but given rapid developments in information technology, Jack had become concerned about the long term viability of the business. His key business objective for the next five years was to make Digitech a more responsive and innovative business, in which decisions could be made and implemented quickly. With this objective in mind, two years ago, Jack and his senior executives decided to convert the existing functional organisational structure to one based on multi-functional teams. The new team-based design would include a customer care team, which was responsible for installing the electronic devices, providing direct support to clients and dealing with customer complaints. Secondly, a development team, responsible for developing new ideas, testing prototypes and determining which new devices will go to market. And thirdly, a manufacturing team, responsible for producing all devices to a high quality standard. It was agreed from the outset that each of these new multi-functional teams could set their own objectives, manage team member roles, have autonomy over their work practices, and take full responsibility for the collective performance of the team.
The new team-based structure was introduced in March 2010. However, despite positive expectations about what new teams could achieve, 18 months after their implementation, both sales and profit began to level off, and then began to fall. Furthermore, all efforts to stop this decline also failed, including pressuring the teams to improve and threatening team members with replacement by others.
When the team-based structure was first implemented, employees at Digitech believed what they were told and operated the teams with a high sense of ownership and excitement. However, they soon began to realise that they did not have the autonomy they thought they had been given. Laura and Simon still wielded the ultimate authority, distributed resources, determined team roles and insisted on approving all team plans and objectives. This created frustration and conflict within the customer care team, in which some members were willing to conform to Laura and Simon’s authority whereas others were adamant to challenge their contradictory actions over what they had previously promised. To make matters worse, the customer care team recently complained that two team members were no longer pulling their weight in the team, showing little concern for the team’s success. These team members often turned up late to client visits, made clumsy mistakes in their work, and put very little effort into collective planning or decision making during team meetings. However, they still took their equal cut of the team’s yearly performance- related bonus. This made some of the other team members particularly frustrated and there was a general concern about lack of commitment and participation amongst members of the customer care team.

Communication between the new teams at Digitech had also started to decline after the first six months. The development team was mainly composed of young university graduates who were full of fresh ideas for new product designs. They considered the manufacturing team, a team composed of more conservative, senior, and long-standing members of Digitech, as too rigid, old-fashioned and uptight in their work, unwilling to change and explore creative ideas. On the other hand, the members of the manufacturing team agreed that the development team lacked maturity and did not have a thorough understanding of manufacturing processes, meaning that their new designs were often unfeasible and would lead to reduced quality outputs. In the past, when the manufacturing team had produced lots of new devices according to the development team’s design plans, the customer care team was left with a multitude of installation problems and customer complaints, which they blamed directly on the manufacturing team. The manufacturing team therefore avoided working with the development team whenever possible.
Jack therefore decided to try and improve the quality of inter-group relations at Digitech by altering the composition of these two teams. He created two mixed groups, whereby every three months two members from the manufacturing team went work with the development team, while two development team members went to work with the manufacturing team.
Based on their insights from the customer care team, the manufacturing team understood that successfully taking new devices to market was often costly, time consuming, and difficult. The two manufacturing team members who were sent to work with the development team therefore tried to persuade the team to be more moderate in the expectations about what new devices could realistically be developed. However, after a lot of frustrating discussions and some interpersonal confrontations, they eventually gave up and agreed that new devices could continue to be developed at the same frequency, regardless of their feasibility. In the end, the two new members were unclear about their roles in the team and felt out of place. As a result, they just decided to go along with what the development team wanted but avoided doing any extra work on behalf of the team.

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