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What are Autonomous Work Teams and High Performing Systems?
By Dave Hess
Introduction
Many work and management practices have emerged over the years. These have been aimed
at boosting performance and productivity, with the hope of organizing companies to become
great and thrive through changing technologies, organizational complexities and fluctuating
economies. Practices such as selecting the right people, training, incentive based pay,
participative management, work teams, Total Quality Management, Safe Quality Foods, ISO,
Re-engineering, Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Total Productive Maintenance, easily come to
mind.
Many companies have invested in a specific approach to optimize performance in one part or
level of the organization only to realize that it resulted in sub-optimizing performance of the
organization as a whole. Searching for an answer that is quick, as painless as possible and
managed by others is appealing. However, the research and experience of other companies
indicate that a comprehensive, sustained systemic approach to strategy, processes and systems
is most likely to transform a company from good to great, and build it to last.
In order to provide some basic insights into autonomous work groups and high performance
work systems, one must understand some of the origins of management practices and how
they have evolved. A brief look into traditional management practices, autonomous work
groups, socio-technical systems design, and open systemplanning is in order.
Scientific Management – The Machine Age
The concept of organization has it’s roots in Scientific Management and traditional
organizations that sprang out of the state, the church and the military, as these were the only
organizations of any size. Organization practices were driven by the advent of the Industrial
Age which shaped the first modern theory of organization known as Machine Theory. This
organization and management model was predominate for over two centuries, and indeed, it
remains as the traditional form of management in many organizations today.
Machine Theory had five foundational premises:
1. Tasks should be specialized and reduced to the smallest possible work cycle. There
should be no duplication of functions—tasks should be handled exclusively by those
assigned to them
2. Work should be performed the same way every time

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3. “Jobs” become compartmentalized collections of work , delineated space, closely
protected by workers
4. Supervisors, through directing and controlling, are supposed to see that all of the “Job”
blocks fit together to meet some productive purpose; information and decision making
is reserved exclusively for those in authority
5. Uniform policies are needed to provide consistency. When mismatches occur, they are
resolved by grievances and arbitration against previously prescribed rules
The Shift from Traditional Machine Theory toward Autonomous WorkTeams and High
Performing Organization Systems
Autonomous teams (unlike participative management and team approaches popular during the
70’s and 80’s) were either designed as completely new start-up organization structures or
introduced as part of an effort to “re-design” a traditional structure and its management
practices.
Open System Planning and Socio-Technical Systems. “The autonomous work group of a socio-
technically designed system provides semi-autonomous space for a group, within identified and
rather fixed boundaries, where workers have the freedom to make decisions. Typically, these
boundaries allot to the workers freedom in the details of task organization, scheduling, quality
control, training, employee relations, vacation scheduling, discipline and the like. The contact
with the encompassing organization is through a boundary manager who has as his/her primary
responsibility, the assurance of needed resources in the nature of machinery, utilities, and new
employees, as well as regulating the input flow of materials, changes in the product, changes in
equipment design, wages and so on. The organization design provides the employee the
opportunity to learn the fundamental operating requirements of the core technology with
which the task group is associated. As the worker gains competence in the basic skills he gains
“access to totality” and opportunity to engage in every domain related to the core process and
its supporting functions. That is, his/her growth potential is enhanced by the freedom to
proactively integrate with the system’s environment to the extent that his training and
competence allow. The task team connects with the organization as it needs resources—
experts to train and help decide on technical issues and so on. Managers become technical
experts and consultants to teams.
This open systemmode of relating to one’s work and co-workers does not suit everyone equally
in either worker or manager roles. People who display high dependency needs find lack of a
highly delineated role and the absence of directive supervision discomforting. People with high
needs for independence also find difficulty with the needs of the team for interdependent
support. For many, however, the opportunity for growth, freedom from structural limitations
and absence of directive supervision are adequate rewards.” Charles G. Krone

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Socio-technical systems (STS) Design was introduced almost 60 years ago by the Tavistock
Institute of Human Relations in London (created in 1947, and still in existence today) to “help
clients grapple with the emerging changes in the organization’s context, encompassing job,
work and organization design for joint optimization of both technical and psycho-social
resources”. The STS process that evolved created some of the first non-traditional
organizations specifically built around autonomous teams that were self managing, and formed
the basis for self-designing and self-adapting organization-wide systems.
Some basic principles of STS design are:
1) Technological and Organizational Choice Technology does not determine work
organization or design. There are choices in the design of technical systems and the
organizations that operate them.
2) Participation People have the right to participate in the design of their own work lives
and in the decisions that guide their work activities.
3) Open Sociotechnical Systems The organization is conceived as a sociotechnical system;
i.e. an integration of a social system, organizational members enacting their roles, and a
technical system, the means they use to accomplish organizational goals, into a coherent
open system in commerce with a relevant environment.
4) Human Values The objective of organizational design should be to provide high quality
work. Quality of Working Life (QWL) is a generic term referring to a wide range of efforts
to improve conditions of work.
5) Minimum Critical Specification Minimum critical specification means that we design as
little as possible and only specify what is essential. Whatever optimal benefits we could
hope to achieve through specification would become obsolete rapidly as tasks,
challenges, and problems changed. Over specification would then cripple the adaptive
capabilities of the work group.
6) Self-Regulating Work Groups The self-regulating work group is the building block of the
organization. Design work groups rather than individual jobs. The object of the design
process is a self-regulating work group with the capability to achieve organizational
objectives under a variety of conditions while maintaining its internal structure and
adapting to changing demands. Within a SRWG, individual work roles shift in content in
response to emerging challenges.
7) Work Group Responsible Autonomy The work group takes responsibility for its
productive outcomes. Work group autonomy is constrained by the requirement that it

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be used to improve organizational performance and effectiveness. The self-regulating
work group is granted considerable autonomy and takes responsibility for the
achievement of organizational goals. Implicitly, the unit of performance control is the
work group rather than the individual. If a semi-autonomous work group is not willing to
exercise control and co-ordination over its members then the design of flow lines must
go back to the traditional model.
8) Inducements to Work The primary inducements to work are necessity and pay. When
organizational performance improves as an outcome of STS designs and participative
management, there arises an expectation that employees will benefit accordingly.
9) Boundary Location Boundaries should be drawn to permit a self-regulatory decision
making within the work group. A crucial design decision is the boundary of the work
group which significantly influences its capacity for self-regulation and control of
technical system disturbances. Unfortunately, both existing organization charts and
technical system designs may reflect boundary assumptions that inhibit effective team
functioning and problem solving. The conditions for self-regulation include
technologically required cooperation or interdependencies within the group, task
differentiation or the grouping of functions in boundable wholes, boundary control or
influence over group boundary crossing transactions and access to the sources of
disturbances and variances that require human intervention. Clear group boundaries
enable autonomy. All of these depend on boundary decisions that subdivide productive
processes among work groups. The principle further implies that the group will have
access to the information needed for control responses and measurement of its
performance. Boundaries should enable members to develop face-to-face relationships
necessary for effective group functioning. The boundaries should define a group of
sufficient size to have the requisite response variety needed to execute the work, to
control and maintain the technical and social systems within the boundary, and to
incorporate administrative functions in the group's role. External controls should be
minimized as the group increasingly coordinates its own activities.
10) Boundary Management The regulation of the interface between work teams and their
organizational environments is a crucial role of management and the work group. The
success of a work place innovation depends on the management of its interface with the
rest of the organization. This boundary management role is usually the primary task of
supervisors and managers but can become a domain of work group action. As self-
regulation evolves, the focus of managerial attention should be shifted from internal
activities to external relations. These relations may be with a variety of organizational
stakeholders including upper management, other departments, staff functions, and

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external bodies. The goal of management is to assure access to those resources needed
by work teams to achieve organizational goals. Work groups need a lengthy period to
evolve their coping abilities. They must be sheltered, for a time, from challenges and
disturbances by the rest of the organization. Designers must attend to this need so that
self-regulating work groups enjoy the sanction, support, and protection by
organizational stakeholders.
11) Joint Optimization The functioning of the technical system and the social system should
be considered conjointly when evaluating design choices. Traditional design practice has
been to engineer the best technical system possible within a budget and later assemble
a work force to operate it. The resulting technical system optimization coupled with a
lack of explicit social systemconsideration leads to sub optimization for the organization
as a whole. Engineers are not trained or qualified to design organizations to optimally
operate their technical systems. Joint optimization requires that the criterion of
effective functioning of the productive organization be placed ahead of mechanical
technical system optima. Therefore, when considering specific design decisions, the
impacts on both technical systems and social organization must be considered. For
example, the control rooms of a petrochemical plant with several products may be
dispersed across a plant in proximity to their processes. Alternatively, they may be
concentrated in a single area. The latter would support the functioning of a single
operating team. Dispersion would make teamwork very difficult. The technical system
cost differential may be small. The goal of design is not a unique optimum so much as an
adaptive organization capable of sustained improvement and viability in the face of
environmental challenges.
12) Organizational Uniqueness Honor each organization's uniqueness. Each organization
should invent itself. Each organization is sufficiently unique that it should design itself,
its component units, and their functioning rather than attempt to copy what others
have done. The complexity of innovative design processes is great reflecting changing
values, differing organizational strategies, specific technological and technical system
challenges, and the unique needs and expectations of individuals. It cannot be captured
or understood by observing the outcomes of others. Copying innovations does not
develop adaptive capacity and flexible response capability. Nor does it provide the
clarification and testing of values necessary to support the innovation over its lengthy
period of experimentation and learning. Exploration and observation of other innovative
organizations extends design horizons and broadens the scope of creative design. It
delineates possibilities beyond the vision of people whose only organizational
experience is in traditional hierarchical organizations.

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13) Variance Control If variances cannot be eliminated, they should be controlled as near to
their point of origin as possible.
14) Multi-Functionalism and Requisite Response. Design work groups with flexible work
roles enabling members to increase their competence, master multiple skills and gain the
requisite response variety to solve problems.
15) Information Flow Information should flow to people who can take effective action.
Information used to control performance cannot be used for self-regulation. Design
information flows so that employees have immediate access to information needed for
effective action.
16) Learning Successful designs will allow for many kinds of learning by the group.
17) Self-Design Design is an ongoing participative activity of the work group as it responds to
changing environmental demands and stakeholder objectives.
Open System Planning (OSP) was pioneered in the work place by Charles G. Krone, James V.
Clark and Michael J. Assumin the late 60’s. Work groups tied to Open Systems Planning and
Socio-Technical Systems design emerged on the scene to challenge the premises of Machine
Theory. It offered for the first time, a model and methodology to systematically and
comprehensively design innovative work systems. This was first applied at Proctor and Gamble,
with the original plant design in Lima, Ohio, and a very innovative start-up at the General Foods
Topeka plant. The original “technician systems” that were conceived at P&G are still closely
guarded today as a highly competitive advantage.
Some basic principles of Open Systems Planning are these:
1) Competitive Effectiveness. The object of designing an organization is the
improvement of its relative competitive position, which determines the success and
survival of the organization.
2) Continuous Improvement. Whatever an organization is doing now that makes it
competitive will be insufficient to keep it competitive in the future. Continuous
improvement depends on the continuous strategic improvement of the way work is
done, the quality of thinking of people, and involving all employees in the business
in development processes and the creative search for better ways to do work.
3) Organization as Systems. Organizations are living systems – indivisible wholes made
up of interdependent parts, and are dependent on their environments. Optimizing
the performance of the parts of an organization results in sub-optimizing the
performance of the organization as a whole. An organization is only as effective as
its ability to make its parts work together.

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4) Quality of Thinking. All employees have minds and can think. All employees can
learn how to use their minds to improve the quality of their thinking. You get better
results by working on improving people’s thinking than by working on improving
their behavior. Using disciplined thinking methods and frameworks to address
business needs leads to better decisions, actions and results than informal methods.
Orderly thought and orderly group process lead people to consider all relevant
factors, their relationships with one another and the big picture.
5) Group Process. Groups that consciously manage their group processes, i.e. how
members effectively work together, get far better results than those that don’t. The
greatest barrier to group effectiveness is the lack of orderliness, i.e. the lack of clear
objectives, agenda items, processes and roles.
6) Human Nature. Motives precede behavior and drive Quality of Work Life. Virtually
all people have two super ordinate motives: 1) to make tomorrow better than today
2) to be part of/contribute to something great. Most individuals seek challenging
work and desire responsibility for helping to accomplish organization objectives.
Employees typically get very interested/involved in beating the competition when
they are given the reason, information and tools to do so. People naturally want to
use higher levels of mental energy. If they are prevented from doing this at work,
they will do so in counterproductive ways and/or off the job.
7) Approaches to Improving Organization Effectiveness. Conventional approaches to
organization effectiveness/capability (e.g. training, pay for performance,
teambuilding, participative management, TQM, re-engineering) tend to produce
limited results because they are partial solutions based on partial truths. Significant
improvements in sustained results require comprehensive, systemic, integrated
changes in structure, systems and processes.
8) Characteristics of High Performing Systems. Most organizations are designed to
control people. High performance organizations are designed to develop people
(who in turn control processes and systems). Most organizations have bias toward
action (the quick fix). High performing organizations have a bias toward quality,
disciplined thinking before taking action. Most organizations have people focused on
the smallest unit of the organization of which they are a part (e.g. functional
management). High performing organizations have people focusing on the largest
whole/business of which they are a part. Most organizations spend almost all of
their energy on managing things as they are or as they’ve always done them. High
performing organizations spend as much energy on improving things as they do
maintaining the status quo. In most organizations, people spend great amounts of
energy trying to overcome or resist different points of view, which tends to polarize

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people. High performing organizations value, seek out and reconcile different points
of view, which results in superior ideas and commitment to make them work.
Performance by Design and Work Teams That Work: Socio-technical Open Systems Design
The design choice that is most likely to sustain performance and productivity over the long haul
is one that marries Socio-technical Systems Design with Open Systems Planning, and uses
autonomous work teams as the basis for new (rather than traditional) organization design.
Research on participative management shows that employee involvement (quality circles,
problem solving teams, cross-functional teams, ad-hoc teams) do not survive because they do
not transform the traditional organization; in fact they compete with it as “parallel” structures
until they are either absorbed by the traditional organization, or leadership makes the design
choice away from traditional to high performing systems based in work teams. Indeed, work
teams too can fail anytime executive leadership, line leadership or task team members are not
passionate about fulfilling the principles of STS and OSP design, because they are substantially
different than those of traditional systems.
The Performance by Design approach consists of five phases as noted in the diagram below:
Phase I Awareness – Discovery & Awareness of STS Design & Team Development
 Indentify scope of business improvement process
 Select sponsorship group (e.g. Executive Team)
 Orient sponsorship group in key concepts, theories, roles & responsibilities
 Identify organization vision and mission (e.g. Core Ideology)
 Identify level of commitment and resources (e.g. Exec Team and Mgt.)
 Select and charter analysis/design team(e.g. cross-functional team)
 Develop and roll out communication plan to organization
Awareness – Chartering & Design Team Kickoff
 Desired end results
 Scope and boundary parameters
 Process and timelines
 Resources
Phase II Open Systems Scan
 Boundary specifications (e.g. define org’n as an open system)
 Environmental demands (customers, stakeholder requirements)
 Purpose definition (e.g. Mission, values, objectives, customer focus strategy)
Technical System Analysis
 Business unit operations (i.e. core process/product state change map)

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 Key Variance analysis (i.e. critical control points, variance control table)
 Identify key roles/responsibilities (i.e. who controls process/variances)
Social System Analysis
 Focal role analysis (i.e. individual, supervisor)
 Social system analysis (i.e. group, cross-group, outside group needs/control)
 Individual motives, needs, development, quality of work life
Phase III Provisional Design/Re-design
 Design principles and criteria (e.g. STS design principles etc.)
 Brainstorm the ideal
 Take the leap
 The best choice (i.e. joint optimization of technical, social and control
systems for the organization, bottom to top)
Phase IV Implementation
 Transition plans and steps (e.g. roll-out, communication, talent development)
 Develop leadership processes (i.e. prepare supervisors to coach)
 Develop work team processes (i.e. team focus, performance, renewal)
 Measure and account (i.e. individuals, teams, leaders)
 Re-fit key support team networking systems (i.e. safety, quality, schedule,
people accountability, conflict resolution, rewards, regulatory compliance,
costs controls, etc))
Phase V Renewal & Refinement
 Feedback systems (individual maturity, team growth, organization
maturity)
 Tracking/Measuring (results, customer expectations, economic drivers)
 Evaluating (passion, overall organization system, culture)
 Refine and re-design

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Consistent with a design based on STS principles for creating a team based organization system,
there is an open systemplanning model that has proven to be very effective for team
development and management as people develop and work to their own team processes.
The Work Teams That Work in the real world team development method consists of seven
integrated team processes in three phases as noted in the diagram below:
Phase I Team Focus – defining and setting direction
 Environmental Process – build a process to monitor customer needs and
those of other teams and stakeholders, how expectations are met/not met
and plans to serve/meet their needs, how to fit the team in harmony with
the larger organization
 Purposing Process – discover and establish team identity, mission, guiding
principles and goals, actions to stay on track to values
Phase II Team Performance – insuring successful product transformation
 Technical Process - depict how the team will work together to control their
inputs/outputs and producing/transformation process, product variances,
work instructions, machine operation etc.
 Social Interaction Process – decide how and when to meet, how to run
effective meetings, communication patterns in and out of the group
 Control Process – decide how and when to get help from technical experts
and what information is essential to maintain product flow, quality, cost etc.
Phase III Team Renewal – feedback for individual, team and system congruence
 Feedback Process – how the team collects and analyzes data on team
performance and gives feedback to other teams
 Individual Needs – how does the team understand individual motives and
skill development, what and how does the team hold each other accountable
for individual effectiveness

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Sources:
“Open Systems Re-Design” and “Open Systems Appreciation” Articles By Charles G. Krone,
unpublished work, and published in The OD Practitioner Journal
Excerpts from material from Charles G, Krone Associates, and Network Associates
Personal experience first gleaned from the core curriculum of the MBA program at The
Monterey Institute and later “Resource Training”, work experience and consulting with Charles
G. Krone, James V. Clark, Michael J. Assumand several members of Network Associates
“Some Principles of Sociotechnical Systems Analysis and Design” by Dr. Eli Berniker
October,1992, School of Business Administration, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma,
Washington 98466
Socio-technical Systems in North America, By Dave Felten and Jim Taylor
High Involvement Management, By Edward Lawler III
“Performance by Design” and “Work Teams That Work” experiential learning materials
developed by my association with members of STS International and subsequent application at
multiple sites companies and industries, acting in both internal and external consultant roles,
and in re-design and start-up environments.