The Empowerment Continuum of Work Teams

In the empowerment chart of work teams, it is difficult to draw the line in one place when unknowing about the work life and environment. Worker involvement is always challenging for depending on where you fall in the hierarchy, difficult decisions will need to be made. The question is, at what point to these decisions compromise the efficiency of team work? For example, the summer job I have sustained the past four years is with a cheerleading organization called SuperCDA. In this company, the ranking of employees is based upon seniority and talent to instruct and choreograph (which in essence, only gets better the more time you are with the company). When decisions are made, under level staff knows it is nothing personal, it is just what needs to be done in order to run an efficient cheerleading camp. Additionally, I rarely receive complaints because once a person puts in their time doing the “housekeeping” tasks, they know they will not have to repeat this job the following year (if they return to SuperCDA). However, in a more corporate setting, seniority may not always be valued as much as talent or skill level. In this case, the line may be drawn differently on the empowerment continuum of work team’s grid.

Starting from the bottom up, the line will absolutely not be drawn from housekeeping through external customer contact. Those eight steps are seen as entry level that team workers can take responsibility for without major repercussions. However, I feel the next item, hiring team members, is a bit out of line. That is a responsibility an employee at the manager level should have. Even though the line is low, I feel it is the safest place to put a cut in order to make team work the most efficient.