Team management

Organizations are composed of a number of interconnected component parts (many of which are people). Like any other system, in order to operate successfully,
these component parts must work in a coordinated fashion.

The interconnections must be managed. Therefore, the difficulty in operating an organization is directly related to the complexity of individual interconnections and to the number of interconnections that must be managed. Both the number and complexity of the interconnections have changed over time, in part because of the following trends:

- Business size—many organizations have grown in size (through mergers and acquisitions) in order to compete or satisfy the ever-growing expectations of shareholders. Indeed, “merger mania” has been common over recent years. These mergers or acquisitions mean that more interconnections must be managed in order for the new organization to be successful and reap the benefits of the growth in size.

- Globalization—this has added the issues of language, culture, currency, local legal regulations, and so forth, which has made some of the individual interconnections more complex.

- Improving efficiency—the pressure to improve the bottom line ultimately leads to fewer resources being available to buffer components from each other.
The typical example here is the impact of removing inventory from supply chains. With lower inventories, an organization has greater difficulty reacting to unexpected production delays, customer demands, and so on. This means that components of the organization that could previously be treated as independent must now be coordinated in order that unexpected situations can be handled successfully.

- Competition/customer expectations—customers expect more and more every day. They have more choice in what is available to them and they can switch
suppliers on a whim. In bygone days, a company could survive if communications between research and development, manufacturing, marketing, and sales
were poor. But this is clearly no longer the case.

- Technological advances, for example, improvements in the field of communications mean that now it is easy to connect parts of the organization. Use of the
Internet in business is a testimony to this. Although these connections may give an organization an advantage initially when they are set up, eventually the organization changes so that it depends on these connections to operate.