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Time to market, product quality, and product complexity are key organizational drivers. Many organizations have responded to these pressures by creating teams. While teams provide the right mix of personnel to respond to business and technical challenges faced by the organization, many organizations have failed to adjust their organizational processes, culture, and systems to create a context where teams can thrive. Identifying the key changes needed to support teams can be a daunting task. The ultimate goal of this research is the development of a tool that will allow organizational leaders to gain a better understanding of what organizational factors should be considered in designing an environment that will enable teams to perform at an optimal level. Previous research findings and semi-structured interviews of organizational leaders were used to develop a framework for studying these organizational processes, culture, and systems. A survey was developed to measure these different characteristics of the parent organization. Findings from the initial interviews and a pilot study utilizing the survey are summarized.

The linkage between strategic planning and daily activities within an organization is often obscure. Perhaps as a consequence, many well‐developed strategic plans fail to be implemented, and required goals and objectives are not attained. Strategy deployment processes link strategic plans with implementation activities. Instead of investing more time and energy in improving planning or implementation processes, an organization should first examine the deployment processes used to link strategic plans with action – “deployment processes” may be the missing link in the strategic management system. This paper studies the application of formal strategy deployment processes within three US federal agencies. The strategic management literature provides the basis for the deployment processes analyzed in this study. Following the analysis of each individual case, an overall assessment of existing supporting and restraining forces that should be considered when working to improve deployment processes is discussed.

Discusses the process and issues involved in developing a performance measurement system for a virtual engineering team working within a high technology environment. This team consists of members from many different sites across the world with a unique role in maintaining standardized manufacturing processes at the lowest possible cost. As a result, they faced many challenges including communication barriers, culture differences, as well as different reporting structures within each individual site. To help address these issues, a performance measurement system was developed to focus the team on the key actions affecting performance instead of the issues getting in the way. A measurement system was developed that linked the team’s objectives to its mission and identified the critical actions associated with each objective.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a study investigating the role of organizational context on the effectiveness of engineering work teams.

Previous research was used to operationalize organizational context and work team effectiveness, and a survey was developed to assess both in this research. This study was conducted within two engineering units of a high‐technology company. In total, 16 teams of engineering knowledge workers participated in the study. Correlation and path analysis were used to investigate both direct and mediated relationships between nine organizational context variables and team effectiveness.

Direct relationships between eight organizational context variables and team member satisfaction and between two organizational context variables and team performance were found. Effects of five variables on team member satisfaction were either fully or partially mediated by team processes (TP).

This study empirically validated existing models of team effectiveness and identified multiple dimensions of organizational context that are important to the development of effective teams as measured by team member satisfaction and team performance. The study took place within a single organization. Additional research is necessary to generalize the findings.

A broader cross‐section of organizational context variables were included in this study than in previous studies. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by empirically studying organizational‐team relationships using intact work teams. This research addressed an increasingly important set of teams – teams of knowledge workers. Finally, this research was designed to specifically test for the existence of a mediating variable (TP).

Management and scholars have been searching for the determinants of project team performance for many years. Individual characteristics and intra‐team processes are most often hypothesized to influence team performance. To date, though, we still do not really understand why some teams perform better than other teams. Studies have provided mixed findings and inconclusive results. The study described in this article continues the search for variables that influence project team performance. The findings provide support for an increasingly, albeit controversial, discussion occurring within human resource circles, concerning the impact of top performers on team performance.

The concepts of joint optimization and socio‐technical systems have been in the literature for over 40 years. However, efforts to operationalize these concepts for managerial practice have not progressed at the same pace as the theory on joint optimization has advanced. This paper represents an effort to turn the theoretical concept of joint optimization into managerial practice by introducing the concept of system equivalence. In this paper system equivalence (the level at which all three systems (social, technical, and environmental) are mutually equivalent in value (is described to indicate how it should be used. This paper then discusses the usefulness of this concept for managerial practice.

How do you evaluate the implementation of large‐scale organizational change? As more organizations are implementing large‐scale improvement efforts, this has become a vital question for organizations. The importance of this question is underscored by the fact that the literature is filled with articles that suggest that many of these projects fail. In this paper, we provide a tool that can be used to measure the implementation of large‐scale improvement efforts and then we demonstrate how we used this tool to assess the implementation of a performance management system in the government of Botswana. We end with three benefits of using a large‐scale evaluation survey tool: (1) it provides hard data on large‐scale implementation; (2) it helps to de‐politicize situations caused by the stress of undergoing a large change; and (3) it provides management with a tool to help them understand how their organization is functioning.

Performance measurement is now commonplace in the private sector. The early focus on financial results has expanded to include measurement of customer satisfaction, business processes, and opportunities for learning and growth. With the increased scrutiny on public and not‐for‐profit organizations to demonstrate measurable results, private sector measurement techniques have been borrowed and applied to these enterprises. The Oregon State Bar (OSB) is the only state bar association in the USA that is known to have pursued a rigorous focus on measurable results for its programs and services. This case study is designed to examine the measures in place for services to sections (special interest groups) within the OSB and recommend improvements. Research on goal setting theory, process management, survey design, and implementation strategies have been used to underpin the case study. The study will show that multiple indicators are necessary at various points in time during the year in order to measure fully whether the desired results are on track for the year.

This paper presents an integrated framework for the selection of attributes used in the evaluation of advanced manufacturing systems. The primary focus in the development of this framework is the modularity of the framework so that it is applicable to a wide range of advanced manufacturing systems with differing process configurations and technologies. Based on data collected from industry and the current body of knowledge, decision attributes were identified and ranked relatively against each other, forming a hierarchy of decision attributes. To simplify the hierarchy, making it more user‐friendly in real‐world applications, each decision attribute was also evaluated relative to the strength of its relationships to other decision attributes. Several decision attributes were found to be highly correlated with others, resulting in a new, single decision attribute. The final decision attribute hierarchy provides managers responsible for making capital decisions involving advanced manufacturing technologies with a framework for their decision making.