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CHAPTER 10: LEADING TEAMS 321
2. Did the interdependence among the subgroups change with the interferon project?
What were the group norms before and after the retreat?
3. What factors account for the change in cohesiveness after the chief biologist took
over?

Burgess Industries
Managers at Burgess Industries, one of the few remaining garment manufacturing com-
panies in eastern North Carolina, are struggling to improve productivity and profits. If
things don’t get better, they and their 650 employees will be out of work. Top executives
have been evaluating whether to close the plant, which makes pants for several different
clothing companies, and move production to Mexico. However, everyone hopes to keep
the North Carolina factory going. The latest effort to turn things around is a shift to
teamwork.
Top executives directed managers to abandon the traditional assembly system,
where workers performed a single task, such as sewing zippers or attaching belt loops. In
the new team system, teams of 30 to 35 workers coordinate their activities to assemble
complete garments. People were given training to help master new machinery and also
attended a brief team-building and problem-solving seminar prior to the shift to team-
work. Approximately 50 workers at a time were taken off the production floor for an
afternoon to attend the seminars, which were spread over a month’s time. As an introduc-
tion to the seminar, employees were told that the new team system would improve their
work lives by giving them more autonomy, eliminating the monotony of the old assembly
system and reducing the number of injuries people received from repeating the same task
over and over.
The pay system was also revised. Previously, workers were paid based on their
total output. A skilled worker could frequently exceed his or her quota of belt loops or
fly stitching by 20 percent or more, which amounted to a hefty increase in pay. In the
new system, people are paid based on the total output of the team. In many cases, this
meant that the pay of top performers went down dramatically because the productivity
of the team was adversely affected by slower, inexperienced, or inefficient team members.
Skilled workers were frustrated having to wait for slower colleagues to complete their
part of the garment, and they resented having to pitch in and help out the less-skilled
workers to speed things up. Supervisors, unaccustomed to the team system, provided
little direction beyond telling people they needed to resolve work flow and personality
issues among themselves. The idea was to empower employees to have more control over
their own work.
So far, the experiment in teamwork has been a dismal failure. The quantity of gar-
ments produced per hour has actually declined 25 percent from pre-team levels. Labor
costs have gone down, but morale is terrible. Threats and insults are commonly heard
on the factory floor. One seamstress even had to restrain a coworker who was about to
throw a chair at a team member who constantly griped about “having to do everyone
else’s work.”

Source: Based on information reported in N. Munk, “How Levi’s Trashed a Great American Brand,” Fortune
(April 12, 1999), pp. 83–90; and R. King, “Levi’s Factory Workers Are Assigned to Teams, and Morale Takes a
Hit,” The Wall Street Journal, (May 20, 1998), pp. A1, A6.

QUESTIONS
1. Why do you think the experiment in teamwork at Burgess Industries has been unsuc-
cessful? Consider the definition of teams, team characteristics and team dynamics,
and issues of leadership.
2. If you were a consultant to Burgess, what would you recommend managers do to
promote more effective teamwork?
3. How would you alleviate the conflicts that have developed among employees?