Works
- The effectiveness of self-managing teams: a quasi-experiment, Human Relations 47(1), 13 to 43, 1994
- Designing Team-Based Organizations: New Forms for Knowledge Work, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, xxvii and 389 pages, 1995
- What makes teams work: group effectiveness research from the shop floor to the executive suite, Journal of Management 23(3), 239 to 290, 1997
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The effectiveness of self-managing and work teams
Ideas
Self-managing teams outperform comparable traditional groups. With Ledford, Cohen found in a quasi-experiment in a telecommunications company that self-managing teams, doing customer service, technical support, administrative support, and managerial work in a variety of locations, were on balance more effective than comparable traditionally managed groups doing the same work. Caveat: One company, a quasi-experiment rather than a randomized one. Read in its abstract only.
Four types of teams. Reviewing 1990 to 1996 research, Cohen and Bailey framed team effectiveness as a function of task, group, and organization design, environment, internal and external processes, and psychosocial traits, across work, parallel, project, and management teams.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.