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Learning Goal: I’m working on a business multi-part question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

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A fad is a fad and teams may be just that—a fad. Teams are in vogue. Team gospel is sermonized everywhere. Many companies have successfully used teams to process work; others have experimented with teams and found them incompatible with management. Others have tried teams, and they have failed.

The concept of using teams is far from new. Mary Parker Follett recommended the use of teams in the 1920s and 1930s but was dismissed because her ideas did not fit the ruling paradigm. (Gender also may have been a contributing factor to Mary’s dismissal.) Peter F. Drucker started talking about teams in the 1950s. Here is an interesting quote from Drucker in his Management Challenges in the 21st Century, (Harper Business, 1999, p. 4):

Everyone these days preaches the team as the “right” organization for every task. Underlying the present orthodoxy regarding teams is a basic assumption held practically by all management theorists and by most practitioners since the earliest days of thinking about organizations, that is, since Henri Fayol in France and Walter Rathenau in Germany around 1900: There is—or at least, there MUST be—One right organization. And what mattered most is not whether the team is indeed “the answer” (so far there is not too much evidence for it), but, as will be discussed a little later, that the basic assumption of the one right organization is no longer tenable. What matters most in a social discipline such as management are the basic assumptions? A CHANGE in the basic assumptions matters even more.

Teams may be one answer. But as noted by Drucker, it is not the only approach.

Below Complete the 4 Questions Below:

Part 1:

Do you agree or disagree with this statement, “A fad is a fad and teams may be just that—a fad.”

1. Search the Internet to find an article about teams.
2. This article should deal with weather a team is a fad or not?
3. Post the URL to this article in this week’s forum.
4. Under the URL, summarize the article.