A longitudinal case study of effectiveness and efficiency in a systems-centered top management team.

摘要

Top Management Teams traditionally follow a Task structure (e.g. an agenda, 'Robert's rules of Order', or some other procedure) in order to organize their communication. This is a longitudinal study of a Top Management Team that applies a specific Task and Process structure (SCT) to manage its organization's hyper-complexity as optimally as possible with the goal of reducing ambiguity, redundancy and contradictions in their communication - in this dissertation operationalized as "Red Light" verbal behaviors. In a quantitative analysis of 50 of their telephone work sessions over a period of two years, three measures were used to determine the communication's effectiveness and efficiency: (1) the team's self-reported Satisfaction and Motivation scores before and after their weekly work sessions (effectiveness), (2) the quality of the team's communication (efficiency), and (3) the frequency of the use of systems-centered methods the team applied to test if any one method or all of them influenced Satisfaction or Motivation. This was followed by a qualitative study of intangible findings in those sessions that exhibited the most and the least amount of information processing and those sessions with the greatest increase and decrease in Satisfaction and Motivation.; Since no significant relationships could be found between individual methods employed and Satisfaction or Motivation, a comparison was made between the team's communication using the SCT Task and Process structure, and a second team of a public not-for-profit organization that used only a Task Structure (Robert's rules of order), as well as a third decision making team that used no structure. Results show that the unstructured team contained the most 'noise' (least information processing), while member Satisfaction and Motivation were not considered in this and the City Council as the first comparison team that used only a Task structure.; The Systems-centered Top Management Team achieved the highest score on information processing (32%), versus 13% in the team using only a Task structure and 17%, in the randomly selected unstructured Decision Making Team. This underscores the powerful influence that a normative structure has in shaping efficient dialogue in groups - in this case influencing the quality and climate of communication in a Top Management Team.