Managing formalization to increase global team effectiveness and meaningfulness of work in multinational organizations

Global teams may help to integrate across locations, and yet, with formalized rules and procedures, responsiveness to those locations’ effectiveness, and the team members’ experiences of work as meaningful may suffer. We employ a mixed-methods approach to understand how the level and content of formalization can be managed to resolve these tensions in multinationals. In a sample of global teams from a large mining and resources organization operating across 44 countries, interviews, observations, and a quantitative 2-wave survey revealed a great deal of variability between teams in how formalization processes were enacted. Only those formalization processes that promoted knowledge sharing were instrumental in improving team effectiveness. Implementing rules and procedures in the set-up of the teams and projects, rather than during interactions, and utilizing protocols to help establish the global team as a source of identity increased this knowledge sharing. Finally, we found members’ personal need for structure moderated the effect of team formalization on how meaningful individuals found their work within the team. These findings have significant implications for theory and practice in multinational organizations

Improving business processes : does anybody have an idea?

As part of process redesign initiatives, substantial time is spent on the systematic description and analysis of the as-is process. By contrast, to-be scenarios are often generated in a less rigorous way. Only one or a few workshops are organized for this purpose, which rely on the use of techniques that are susceptible to bias and incompleteness, e.g. brainstorming. In this paper, we evaluate a new technique for generating process improvement ideas: the RePro (Rethinking of Processes) technique. Its backbone is formed by process improvement principles that guide practitioners in a systematic and comprehensive exploration of the solution space. An experiment was conducted to compare the performance of the RePro technique with traditional brainstorming. Results confirm the potential for using a more advanced technique during process redesign workshops, but also show that the way such a technique is used strongly affects its performance. Keywords: Process redesign Process innovation Improvement principles Controlled experiment RePr