Cross Functional Teams: Working with Allies, Enemies, and Other Strangers

Abstract

A quiet revolution is sweeping across America, making for some strange bedfellows. In many organizations, individuals from a variety of disciplines are working together on cross-functional teams. Building bridges with senior management, overcoming communication barriers, empowering the teams, and forging common goals are some of the greatest challenges to team productivity. Author Glenn Parker has written the definitive practical guide to fluid and productive collaborations. With examples from more than one hundred companies using cross-functional teams successfully - including Merck & Company, Johnson & Johnson, Sun Microsystems, the EPA, and others - Parker offers concrete advice and inspiration to team members, team leaders, and senior management. Cross-Functional Teams delivers a team operating manual to executives, team leaders, human resource professionals, and students of organizational behavior. It provides a tool kit of assessment surveys, worksheets, checklists, and even sample training programs to help launch teams that soar. Cross-Functional Teams offers concrete advice on how to achieve organizational goals by igniting individual creativity and initiative; exploit the competitive advantages inherent in cross-functional teams; build a successful cross-functional team with an effective leader, a clear purpose, an effective training plan, diverse membership, and practical resources; recognize and dismantle team obstacles and build bridges to success; and reward team performance and tackle the sticky issue of performance appraisals.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 174 citations exist upstream.