Summary
The objectives of this article are to introduce and develop team charters as tools to link corporate-level mission statements and strategies to activities at the team level. The theoretical frameworks of psychological contracts and realistic Job previews provide the foundation. Based on relevant literature and anecdotal experience, the authors offer specific guidance on the content of team charters, suggest a set of applications, and discuss limitations. The principal beneficiaries should be practitioners charged with quality initiatives at all organizational levels.
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Team Charters: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Implications for Quality and Performance
INTRODUCTION
Do not write it as a formula. ..rigid rules simply won't work. Teach men to think. And keep the thing simple so generals can understand it.- Col. John Boyd to a young officer charged with writing a Marine Corps tactics manualThe ability to produce and deliver quality products and services in hyper-competitive, global markets is no longer a high-order goal achieved by a few industry exemplars; rather, it has become the price of admission to compete in virtually every business domain. To achieve excellence, organizations must seek and implement effective tools and techniques to transform quality from an abstract concept to a shared value embedded in the fabric of every part of an organization. One such method with demonstrated effectiveness is the team charter.Team charters have been discussed in training and development, quality management, and project management literature (Buchel 1996; Robinson 2005; Wilkinson and Moran 1998), but the construct is underdeveloped. The early efforts often have taken the form of case studies. To be sure, case studies add value with anecdotal evidence: Team charters do indeed work. A case study as a tool to transfer learning, however, suffers from clear limitations, specifically, its atomistic nature (typically n = 1), absence of theoretical foundation, and lack of prescription for practicing managers. The authors see both power and promise in team charters and seek to directly address these shortcomings by advancing a theoretical foundation for team charters, proposing a framework with broad application, discussing pragmatic issues affecting the successful implementation of team charters, and suggesting links to the accomplishment of quality objectives and supraorganizational performan...See the full content of this document
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