WITHDRAWAL OF TEAM AUTONOMY DURING CONCURRENT ENGINEERING

Team autonomy is an essential characteristic of cross-functional teams engaged in concurrent engineering. At the same time it is a character istic that North American firms have considerable difficulty in succes sfully implementing. Delegating a good deal of decision making to team s is often counteracted by processes that during a new product program withdraw some of a team's autonomy or discretion. Data from 53 cross- functional product development teams in 14 firms indicated that withdr awing autonomy is negatively correlated with both task and process asp ects of team performance. The determinants of withdrawing discretion i nclude lack of a shared understanding of the development process, envi ronmental change, and lack of managerial ''buy-in'' to team autonomy. Consequently, successful implementation of team autonomy, through miti gating withdrawal of discretion, requires a clear well-communicated mo del of the development process, a freezing of design revisions, and po licies that encourage managers to support the team rather than interfe re in its decision making.