Spirit of Organization

AUTONOMOUS WORK TEAMS CAN CONTRIBUTE SIGNIFICANT ADVANTAGES to an organization because organizations that encourage such teams tend to be more creative than the traditional control and command organizations. When people are given the tools and the authorization to think, decide and make judgments in a context of responsible yet playful autonomy, innovative solutions to problems can become the norm. A controlling workplace climate crushes the creative spirit but an empowering environment encourages creativity.

There are however, certain qualities that the members of such teams need to have before this creative impulse can be released and channeled into productive ideas and products to the benefit of the organization. One of these qualities is the ability to tolerate ambiguity.

Ambiguity is that state of things when outcomes are doubtful and paths are uncertain, when the meaning of events is confusing and the data are unclear. All organizations face ambiguity to some degree every day of their existence; sometimes the ambiguity rises to critical levels when it seems that the organization’s very survival is threatened.

What we often fail to recognize, however, is that these times of ambiguity present a great opportunity for the organization to discover breakthroughs that can lead it into the next level of productivity as it finds new ways to fulfill its mission in today’s environment. The threat of non-existence can compel us to ask the previously unasked and unaskable questions that lie under the surface of organizational life. Times of ambiguity cause us to pull these questions out of their subterranean hideout and thrust them into the light where they are given the opportunity to express themselves. On the other hand, these times may also produce the opposite effect; they may cause people to cover these unspeakable questions with an even deeper level of denial and retreat into the comfortable place of past patterns for dealing with problems. What often happens in times of crisis is that people fly to the first apparent solution that pops into view. We do this to rid ourselves of the pain of ambiguity.

Even in the Bible’s description of creation, we find ambiguity before creativity. We read in the first chapter of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep” (vv. 1-2a). This is a great description of ambiguity! It is a time when things have not yet taken an identifiable form. We don’t know how to answer the questions because we don’t yet know what they are. Is it a technological problem or a social problem? Is the problem related to what we did last year or last month, or twenty years ago? Are we experiencing the results of some change in the social and cultural environment that we have not detected? Are there multiple factors contributing to this situation?

Returning to Genesis, it is important to notice the latter half of verse 2: “The Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” Scholars tell us that the Hebrew verb translated “moving” is one that was used to describe the hovering or brooding of a bird over its young. It is the time of incubation.

The reason why this discussion is important to our theme of empowerment is that empowered individuals have learned to tolerate the ambiguity long enough to incubate the best solution to the problem. The very process of empowerment itself produces a sense of ambiguity because it requires a willingness to give up the protection and safety of dependency on higher authorities (Field, 1997, p. 153). Some employees may resist empowerment because it feels uncomfortably ambiguous. They may be used to having not only outcomes but also means and ways clearly defined for them by others. As mentioned in previous posts, objectives and parameters should be clearly defined by the superior; this will help to alleviate some unnecessary ambiguity. Nevertheless, in an empowering organization, decisions about how to get the job done are left to the employee and this in itself may be more ambiguity than what they are accustomed to. They will not be handed a pre-established “program” in which they simply adhere to the rules and follow procedures.

Empowered employees have to think for themselves and often engage in what Scott and Bruce (1994) refer to as bisociative thinking, the use of intuition and thinking across the boundaries of different departments and disciplines to find solutions to problems related to their mandate. Under the pressure of ambiguity, however, employees often run to the leader for relief; they want resolution and closure as soon as possible.

Leaders who do not understand the dynamics of empowerment, out of misdirected compassion or because it makes them feel more powerful, often succumb to these requests for resolution by telling them what to do. In so doing, they have disempowered the employee and reestablished dependence on themselves. So, a key skill to teach employees is tolerance for ambiguity. As author Mary Gordon puts it, “One of the most important parts of the creative process is to learn to be patient, to learn how to sit in the mess” (Cited in Patrick, 2006, p. 31).

This is especially true when the organization is going through a period of change, which, in today’s environment is the norm rather than the exception. The period between the phasing out of the old and the institutionalization of the new is extremely difficult. As Tichy and Devanna (1990) point out, “this phase causes the most trouble in action oriented Western cultures, for it tends to be viewed as nonproductive” (p. 32). Yet, it is vital that the incubation period not be cut short and that the members of the empowered team have enough tolerance for ambiguity to multiply alternatives and choose the better solution.

Questions for Reflection

(1) What have you experienced in terms of organizational ambiguity? (2) Why do you think people so easily fall back on the familiar? (3) Is tolerance for ambiguity a skill that can be learned? If so, how? (4) What are the trends today that contribute to ambiguity in your church or organization?

Works Cited

Field, Laurie. “Impediments to Empowerment & Learning Within Organizations.” The Learning Organization 4, no. 4 (1997): 149-158.

Patrick, Bethanne Kelly. “When Your Creativity Takes a Hike: How Five Novelists Have Found Ways to Get It Back.” The Writer 119, no. 1 (2006): 28-31.

Scott, Susanne G., and Reginald A. Bruce. “Determinants of Innovative Behavior: A Path Model of Individual Innovation in the Workplace.” Academy of Management Journal 37, no. 3 (1994): 580-607.

Tichy, Noel M., and Devanna, Mary Anne, The Transformational Leader: The Key to Global Competitiveness. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1990.

Photo from morgueFile.com by peachyqueen. 27 October 2006. Available at http://www.morguefile.com/archive/?display=142974&

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WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU RUN INTO A ROADBLOCK in the path toward accomplishing your work? How do you respond to unexpected obstacles and unforeseen problems? Most people–either by choice or because this is the only option the organization allows–fall back on the wisdom of their superiors to resolve the problem for them. This perpetuates dependency on the manager, creates structural bottlenecks, and does not allow the employee to develop the capacity to exercise wisdom, a fundamental requisite for empowerment and for the development of autonomous work teams.

By definition, in an autonomous work team, employees no longer depend on their superiors for the wisdom to make decisions; they accept the responsibility for making their own decisions. Where then can they turn for that wisdom? They must themselves learn to listen to the voice wisdom. They need to discover the sources of wisdom and learn how to tap that source on a regular basis. In my last post, I talked about autonomous work teams that have the responsibility and authorization to produce a specified outcome from start to finish. This means they must develop the processes, procure the resources, and control the quality without the constant direct intervention of authorities outside the team. This is why a fundamental skill of such teams is that their members know how to find and exercise wisdom.

Daft (2004) distinguishes between data, information, and knowledge (p. 297). Data are “the simple facts and figures that, in and of themselves, may be of little use.” Information has to do with the “data that have been linked with other data and converted into a useful context for specific use.” Knowledge is “a conclusion drawn from the information after it is linked to other information and compared to what is already known.” I would add wisdom as a fourth category. Wisdom is the subjection of knowledge to universal spiritual principles and its consequent use in real situations. Wisdom takes new information and filters it through the grid of universal principles to come up with innovative solutions.

A key component of wisdom is critical thinking, the ability to analyze the status quo–what Schein (1999) calls “basic assumptions“–through the lens of new knowledge and universal principles. These represent the source of innovation. New knowledge looks toward the future while the universal principles are drawn from the lessons of the past, including entire past generations of experience and thought. Critical thinking is as much an attitude as it is a skill. It is the attitude that refuses to be bound by conventional thinking and conventional solutions.

An empowered employee must move beyond data, information, and even knowledge. He or she must listen to the voice of wisdom to make appropriate decisions for which they will accept accountability. It is easier to fall back on solutions that have worked for us in the past than it is to think through the uniqueness of our present situation and to forge new solutions that break the old patterns.

Leaders who want to develop autonomous work teams need to look for individuals who know how to find their own sources of wisdom and can apply that wisdom to the task. One of the skills of wisdom is the ability to think about the future, recognize trends and anticipate events or outcomes that may affect the organization (Bell, 2003, p. 70). Unempowered employees tend to look for wisdom outside the realm of their own network of knowledge recourses, depending on their superior to make decisions whenever they run into a problem that challenges established patterns. An empowered employee, on the other hand, will search for innovative solutions to such problems through the use of critical thinking, inquiry, experimentation, and the linking of sound principles to creative options.

To be empowered, an employee needs to be able to exercise wisdom as he or she faces problems that defy conventional thinking. This is a higher level of involvement than the old boss-dependent paradigm that left the employees mind and heart at the door and treated them like machines. In an autonomous work team, employees think and pursue wisdom regarding the success of their project just as much as top management does for the success of the organization as a whole. Wisdom is not found in the closed sessions of some planning committee. It “shouts in the street [and] lifts her voice in the square” (Proverbs 1:20, NASB). In other words, it is available through life and its experiences and, for a company, through the interaction of employees with customers, suppliers, and others with whom the employee directly interfaces.

If you want your organization to be an empowering organization you need to train your people in the discovery and exercise of wisdom. Provide training in critical thinking. Provide opportunities for cross-divisional interaction where people from different departments can compare notes in an informal setting, thus stimulating thought and challenging assumptions. Reward those who take the initiative in resolving problems. You also need to lead others in the discovery and development of their spiritual nature for the spirit is the reservoir of wisdom. Encourage your people to trust their instincts assuming they have assessed all available sources of information and knowledge. Wisdom often is not easily codified and categorized because if flows from our pre-conceptualized spiritual understanding. Saint John of the Cross wrote: “Inward wisdom is so simple, so general and so spiritual that it has not entered into the understanding enwrapped or cloaked in any form or image subject to sense” (St. John of the Cross, Bk. 2, Ch. 17, Para. 3). It is what we often refer to as one’s “gut feeling,” “instinct,” or “tacit knowledge.”

Empowered employees learn to tap into the ultimate source of wisdom. As a Christian, I believe that God is our ultimate source of wisdom. Too often, Christians have relegated the interventions of God to one or two days a week in buildings especially designated for such purposes. We have disassociated God from the workplace. The biblical record, however, gives ample testimony to the fact that God wants to be involved in every aspect of our lives. James, the brother of Jesus, wrote: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him” (James 1:5, NASB). He did not say this was true only in Sunday School or church.

The bottom line is that empowering organizations encourage their people to think for themselves. Wisdom is the application of that thinking to the resolution of real problems and the voice of wisdom can be heard by all who are willing to listen.

Questions for Reflection

(1) What are some reasons why people may be afraid to make decisions? (2) How can a leader help his or her employees overcome this fear? (3) What can the organization do to encourage critical thinking in the workplace? (4) What are some of the “traditional solutions” in your organization that are no longer working as they once did?

Works Cited

Daft, Richard L., Organization Theory and Design. Mason, OH: South-Western, 8th ed., 2004.

Wendell, Bell, “Foundations of Futures Studies: History, Purposes, and Knowledge.” In Human Science for a New Era, Vol. 1. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003.

St. John of the Cross. Dark Night of the Soul. ed. Allison E. Peers. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.

Schein, Edgar H. “Empowerment, Coercive Persuasion & Organizational Learning: Do They Connect?” The Learning Organization 6, no. 4 (1999): 163-172.

Photo by Henry Trotter. 2005. Available from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:SML-Owl-Death-Sculpture.jpg, Accessed 21 January 2008.

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In the first part of this series of posts on Empowerment, I approached the subject from the perspective of the Leader. In my post of December 2, 2007, I began a new series of posts that look at Empowerment from the perspective of the empowered employee (or church member). The idea here is that Empowerment does not just make demands on the leader but also requires certain aptitudes and attitudes from the employee. One of these aptitudes is what I call “Team Capability.”

For most of the 20th century, organization theory was dominated by a mechanistic model that was conceptualized in the language of physical inanimate structures. The charts that were intended to depict the relationships of an organization looked like the structural architecture of a warehouse, with their hierarchical boxes organized in the shape of a pyramid. One of the key aspects of these organizational charts was a focus on individual authority and subordination.

Today, theorists are talking about the need for more organic models of organization. It seems that we have finally come to recognize that organizations are simply groups of people working together for a common purpose. People are not inanimate structures–like buildings or Lego blocks. They are living, breathing, thinking, organisms who combine to form a living, breathing, thinking organization. Like a human body, organizations have many individual parts, with each part contributing to the functioning of the whole.

This is why when we talk about Empowerment we cannot only talk about individual Empowerment. Empowerment necessarily involves the formation of empowered teams. It is collective empowerment. Ashkenas, Ulrich, and Kerr (2002) suggest that organizations must “enhance team decision making by giving teams authority to make decisions about their work processes” (p. 157). In other words, empowerment is not about self-empowerment as this would only lead to the disintegration of the organization. It is about joint empowerment, the empowerment of teams.

Too many people think of power as a zero-sum quantity where the increase of the power of one necessitates the decrease in the power of others. It’s like cutting a cake into individual pieces. Cutting one piece larger than the rest means that the other pieces must be smaller. The organic model of organization, however, understands that the cake itself can grow. The increase of power to one means the increase in power for the whole group. Empowerment is not about self-aggrandizement or individual power grabbing. Such attitudes and behavior only lead to a reduction in the overall capability of the organization.

Before I go further, we need to define a team. A team is not simply a group of people. When we sit at the airport in the company of other passengers waiting for our flight to arrive, we are a group but we are not a team. Kiely (2001) defines teams as “groups of people who have common goals and operate interdependently to achieve goals which could not be achieved by any one individual acting alone” (p. 192). From this definition we see that the core components of a team are a shared goal and the ability to work together toward the achievement of that goal. This ability is what I am calling “Team Capability.”

Another way that organizations are trying to put into effect the organic model is through the use of Autonomous Work Teams (also referred to as “High Performance Work Teams or HPWTs). Galbraith (2002) describes autonomous work teams as “multiskilled teams of educated workers. . . . [who are] given end-to-end responsibility to make decisions for an entire piece of work, providing a more rapid and effective work flow” (p. 19). In such organizations, the reward system is not directed at individuals but at the team as a whole. Nadler and Tushman (1997) describe the principles of HPWTs as “the meshing of formal structures and social processes to provide self-managed teams of people with the information, skills, accountability, and incentives to achieve universally understood performance goals that will provide value to the customer” (p. 140). This definition shows that such teams are not autonomous in an absolute sense; they are responsible to the “universally understood performance goals.” They are then authorized to develop the processes whereby they will achieve these goals.

What is fascinating about teams from an organic perspective is that they can become living organisms that grow and develop in a natural process of internal self-nurturing. The apostle Paul described something similar when he wrote about the church being a body that is “fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, [which] causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love” (Ephesians 4:16, NASB). Teams can develop an internal synergy that does not require the constant input of external direction but can nurture and develop itself toward increased productivity and growth. This increase in productivity is the reason why so many are promoting HPWTs; they are simply more effective at producing quality outputs.

Getting back to my main point–that Empowerment not only requires something of the Leader but also of the Empowered follower–what are the aptitudes needed in the individuals who make up such teams? What are the core components of Team Capability? There are three foundational conditions for such teams to develop and be successful: a team atmosphere, team attitudes, and team alignment.

When I talk about a Team Atmosphere, I’m talking about a corporate culture that is conducive to autonomous work teams. Such an atmosphere exists when people are willing to cooperate with and care for one another. It is an atmosphere where individuals are committed to the success of the team and not solely or even primarily focused on their own success or recognition. This is the atmosphere that the apostle Paul described in Philippians 2:3-4,

Don’t push your way to the front; don’t sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand (Philippians 2:3-4, The Message).

Creating such an atmosphere requires that team members have the right attitude. It means finding individuals who are willing to work together, laying aside their individualist agendas and working for the good of the team. It means valuing the unique contributions of other members of the team. This requires a degree of emotional fitness. As Ashkenas, Ulrich, Jick, and Kerr (2002) point out, the model of cross-functional work teams “does not lend itself to individuals who are stubborn and egotistical; instead, it values self-assured, open, inquisitive people who see the advancement and successful marketing of their common project as their main purpose” (pp. 104-105). The inability to see value in opinions and points of view that are different from our own is one of the destroyers of team cohesiveness.

Finally, Team Capability has to do with aligning individual contributions to produce an integrated body working together to resolve the challenges involved in reaching the team’s goals. The organization should provide opportunities for its people to discover their gifts and competencies. Once discovered, they should also have programs that enable them to develop and refine these competencies. When these individual contributions are integrated into a robust team, the output is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Not only are individuals empowered, but the team as a whole is empowered to take ownership of a project and see it through from start to finish.

Questions for Reflection

(1) In your experience, what are some attitudes or behaviors that work against the formation of successful teams? (2) What do you think are the underlying roots of these attitudes and behaviors? (3) Do you agree that high performance work teams produce more and better quality outputs? Why? (4) What are some characteristics of God that encourage us to work in teams?

Sources Cited

Ashkenas, R., Ulrich, D., Jick, T., & Kerr, S. (2002). The boundaryless organization: Breaking the chains of organizational structure. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kiely, L. S. (2001). Overcoming time and distance: International virtual executive teams. In W. H. Mobley & M. W. McCall (Eds.), Advances in Global Leadership (Vol. 2, pp. 185-216). Oxford: Elsevier Science.

Galbraith, J. R. (2002). Designing organizations: An executive guide to strategy, structure and process (Revised ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Nadler, D. A., & Tushman, M. L. (1997). Competing by design: The power of organizational architecture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Peterson, E. (2002). The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. NavPress.

Photo by Gracey Stinson. (July 3, 2006). Available at http://www.morguefile.com/archive/?display=127643&. Accessed January 3, 2008.

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