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Sociotechnical Interventions and Teams in Australia: 1970s-1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Andrew Griffiths
Andrew Griffiths*
Affiliation:
Centre for Corporate Change, Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales
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Abstract

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This paper sets out to highlight some of the major sociotechnical and team interventions in Australia from the seventies through to the nineties. The review notes that teamwork interventions have changed over the last two decades and argues that this may be attributed partly to the popularity and influence of Japanese management approaches during the eighties along with changes to the industrial relations institutions. Team interventions associated with earlier sociotechnical and participant design approaches, undertaken in the seventies, concentrated on changing work and jobs as a way to address quality of work life concerns. In contrast, many Australian organisations which are presently implementing teams are linking them to broader organisational design issues, taking into account product flows, customer and supplier focus, product innovation and support systems. It is noted that later-style team interventions are linked closer to an organisation’s strategic goals.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , June 1995 , pp. 73 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 1995

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Dexter Dunphy and John Mathews for comments they made on an earlier version of this paper. This paper was written from research currently being undertaken by myself and Dexter Dunphy at the Centre for Corporate Change examining the rise of an organisational change movement in Australia from 1965–1995.1 would also like to acknowledge the use of research based on the monograph, Self managing teams and changing supervisory roles, by Ben Bryant, Noga Farhy and myself. A version of this paper was presented at the International Colloquium on Organisational Innovation and the Sociotechnical Systems Tradition held in Melbourne 26, 27 May 1995.

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