ABSTRACT
Self-managing teams, problem-driven project teams, co-managing teams and similar groups are all based on ideas that sprang from the group and democracy movement that began in the United States during the interwar years and culminated in the Western world during the 1970s. Self-managing teams have aspects of Lewin’s ‘democratic atmosphere’ and ‘democratic leadership’, as they contain a progressive element in their insistence on the competency of employees and students as well as an element of manipulation. The company that provided the empirical input to this chapter initially introduced a ‘self-management’ concept. One Thursday at noon, the team members decided they had done enough work for the week and went home. When they reported back in on Monday morning, the ‘self-managing’ team had been renamed a ‘co-managing’ team. The term ‘self-managing’ signals that no one has external authority over the team, which is not the case; it also has connotations to something that ‘runs itself’, effortlessly – which is also not the case. Group work in education usually has more to do with actual self-management but lacks leadership to protect the participants against their own brutality, which can often turn group work into a traumatic experience.
