Team characteristics and technological innova-tion in the TI branch
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2019-03-11
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en
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Abstract
This study targets technological innovations that are developed in a specific context, the tech-nical installation branch (TI). Within this branch, the importance of being innovative is in-creasing due to radical, environmental and sustainable changes or improvements within the market of the TI branch as desired by the consumers. The study points to technological inno-vations. These are innovations in processes, products or services. Besides this, changes in so-cial structures, such as self-managing teams, are upcoming in this market. A few companies in this branch claimed to experiment with working in self-managing teams, in which teams may bear a high responsibility towards the tasks they perform. It is studied to what extent characteristics of (self-managing) teams hinder or facilitate the potential of project teams to develop bottom-up technological innovations. Furthermore, overall organisational structural choices may influence the potential of the teams as well, to develop the technological innovations. A specific company within the Technical Installation branch is studied by the help of qualitative research. This company has ad-hoc project teams that show characteristics of self-managing teams and are composed to perform projects. Furthermore, this company is an interesting case because of the fact that they recently produced different technological innovations. The study finds that the design choices for the organisational structure as well as (self-managing) team characteristics influence the potential of project teams to develop technological innovations. Important results can be grouped by a need of ownership, responsibility and authorities in the teams. Being involved and having the right authorities towards a teamtask (or sub-order) is a specific effect of the choices made to develop project teams at Van Delft. The results involvement, ownership or responsibility are influenced by structural related choices at organisational level as well. These choices mainly have to do with task-completeness, mutual dependency between departments, choices about related and even complementary activities and the differences in authorities on organisational level.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen