Managers in teams: How valuing individualism or collectivism affects their participation

This research documents dissimilar outcomes found in two petrochemical plants responding to a common corporate mandate to institute more participative practices. Participative practices in teams, the focus of this report, are analyzed to learn ways in which they reflect a value upon either individualism or collectivism. The analysis chapters explain how human resource systems, plant manager's style, and national culture can influence participation in teams in ways that foster a collective agenda and dampen the self-interest of individual team members or vice versa. This work is distinctive in combining the anthropological methods of emic and etic description and analysis with a functional examination of bureaucratic dysfunctions.;Major research findings include the following: that favorable conditions for participation obtain when systems align with organizational structure; that members who exhibit good group skills and can serve as their own process consultants are central to developing self-managing teams; that participation is a "hard sell" to most US business executives because of its countercultural values and their successes without it; that national cultures provide uniquely different contexts which exert muted but unmistakable influence on participation; and, finally, that attending to members' personal meanings of the concept "team", created from their first hand experiences, reveals variants of participation.;The findings imply that practitioners launching participative changes can expect increased congruence between efforts and success when they actively discern potential participants' personal meanings about teamwork. These data will give them an edge when orchestrating action via the web of structure, systems, actors and culture, all of which alternately pose restraints upon and create unique opportunities for participation. For scholars, studying participation is important because its use is much more likely in the immediate and protracted future. Competitive pressures ensure this despite cynicism about its effectiveness among executives and recipients of past doses. Furthermore, participation goads academicians and practitioners alike to grapple with a conundrum: how to bring the harmonious social relations and mutual dependence of collective thought to economic enterprise which typically treats human beings as instruments and generally rewards individual achievement and self-reliance rather than collaboration with others.