Industry: Energy—Deepwater petroleum production

Client organization: A Fortune 100 multi-national petroleum producer

Situation: A deepwater oil platform had been installed in a new oil “field” using a management structure new to the oil industry—self-directed work teams (SDWTs). The client wanted an independent third party to document the effectiveness of the organizational design, to summarize lessons learned across the work teams, and to identify opportunities for improving/refining the design.

Approach: Ethnography—a researcher lived on the platform 24 hours-a-day for two one-week stays, separated by two weeks off the platform, replicating the crew members’ schedule. Time on the platform was spent observing individuals and teams complete routine work, small and large team meetings and decision-making, and interactions between teams responsible for managing different aspects of the platform’s operation. The researcher supplemented the observation data with one-on-one and small group interviews, card-sorting exercises, and questionnaires.

Findings: The key finding was that each team’s interpretation and enactment of the “Principles and Guidelines for Effective Teams” that had been part of every employee’s training had been strongly shaped by their respective work responsibilities. Whether the workflow was episodic or continual, required individual v. cooperative activity, or involved only internal employees versus outside contractors, all dramatically impacted each team’s perception of what constituted a “good” team, what it meant to do teamwork “correctly,” and the behaviors perceived to support or inhibit team cohesion.

In addition, while the executives responsible for instituting self-directed work teams had anticipated that first line supervisors would be unsettled by a perceived loss of control, they had underestimated the impact of the change on the managers’ identities, resulting in most managers experiencing an extended period of “worthlessness.”

Finally, as has been documented in previous studies of self-directed work teams, lack of clarity on the boundaries of the workers’ autonomy resulted in frustration and dissatisfaction when the workers encountered limits to their self-determination.

Impact: The client organization intended to install one new deepwater platform per year using the same self-directed work team organization design. Our findings were used to modify their training practices and materials, both to allow for natural variations among teams and to clarify the boundaries of the teams’ authority.

Tagged as: Fortune 100, management structure, organizational design, self-directed work teams

{ 0 comments }