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Michael Beyerlein

Work teams in some form or other are gradually spreading around the world in a wide variety of work settings. For example, Lawler, Mohrman, and Ledford (1995) reported that since their 1987 survey the use of self-managing work teams (SMWT's) in Fortune 1000 companies increased from 68 per cent to 91 per cent (e.g., the company used SMWTs some place within the organization). Recently, Porto (1997) did a less extensive survey of 50 companies recently. Among the results she obtained over 50 per cent and sometimes over 75 per cent of the sample believed that the use of...