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Following health-care organisations, many mental health-care organisations nowadays consider starting to work with self-managing teams as their organisation structure. Although the concept could be effective, the way of implementing self-managing teams in an organisation is crucial to achieve sustainable results. Therefore, this paper aims to examine how working with self-managing teams can be implemented successfully in the mental health-care sector where various factors for the successful implementation are distinguished.

This qualitative case study is executed by analysing 18 interviews within two self-managing teams in a mental health-care organisation located in the Netherlands. A coding process is executed in two steps. The first step is open coding, to make small summarising notes within each interview section. The second step is refocused coding, where the open codes were collected, categorised and summarised by searching for recurrence and significance. The coding process is made visible within a code tree. This code tree formed the basis for writing the findings.

Success factors for the implementation of a self-managing team that resulted from this research are a clear task portfolio division, good relationships within the team and a coaching trajectory with attention for a possible negative past.

By having used a specific change management model, the Change Competence Model, it can be concluded that a high change capacity will positively influence the success of a self-managing team in the context of a mental health-care organisation.

Firms around the world are facing an ever‐increasing array of employee‐related problems, such as decreasing productivity, faltering quality of products, persistent absenteeism, worker dissatisfaction, and high levels of turnover. Exacerbating this situation, there is a worldwide recession and explosive geopolitical developments, which have led to great uncertainties in world markets. For many organizations, the need to respond effectively to these problems is of paramount importance, as their economic viability hangs in the balance. To deal with the challenges of today′s global environment and to stay competitive in the world marketplace, organizations need to look beyond the sphere of traditional directive management and the limited application of participative management. One concept, which is showing particular promise in this regard as a comprehensive solution, is that of self‐managing teams (SMTs). Explores the essence of this concept, the unique role which it assigns to management, some of its drawbacks and benefits. Also suggests some critical requirements for successful implementation.

The purpose is to provide explanations for why some self-managing teams survive and develop over a long period of time.

The research design is longitudinal, having worked with several research projects over a period of 20 years. Interviews, observation, field notes have been widely used, and also participative methods while one of the authors has worked on the shop floor for six weeks.

The authors offer several explanations: the maturity of teams; the process of institutionalization and creation of strong normative values; practices being “infused with meaning” and decoupling of practice from official policy.

The weakness is that the research presented is from one company, and within a Norwegian context which has certain characteristics. The contribution is the emphasis on institutional elements and the methodological implications regarding informal practice where explicit information is incomplete.

By offering an explanation for why self-managing teams can survive, one can also prescribe some important learning. Mutual cooperation and high level of autonomy prove to be important.

The main contribution is the authors' access to unique empirical data, and that they show and explain the social mechanisms for institutionalization of teamwork through participative observation.

Quality empowering management is to the future of renewed worldwide competitiveness what quality control, participative management programmes and zero defects were to quality improvement. Empowerment holds that promoting employee involvement empowers workers to perform as whole, thinking human beings. Empowerment is the glue by which the elements of customer focus, quality process and products, continuous improvements, self‐managing teams, quality measurement, and utilization of the total workforce abilities are held together. Self‐managing teams are one of the major keys in the innovative organization to solving complex problems, increasing productivity, and heightening creativity. For most organizations and managers, quality empowering management is a new responsibility and a radical change in style of management and change in culture requiring new methods and systems.

This paper deals with the leeway organizations have to develop and design self‐managing teams by using a model containing four modal verbs: must, may, can and will. “Must” refers to the need for local decision making and is considered to be the result of diversity in environmental demand and variety in work processes. “May” pertains to organizational and work designs that facilitate local decision making. The skills and abilities of the workers are covered by the modal verb “can”, while “will” refers to the attitudes of the workers towards self‐managing teams. The model may help to find and realize a match between these “modalities”.