There is a management revolution in American industry, where many organizations are Switching from the old “control” paradigm to the new paradigm in “high involvement organizations.” Assumptions of the involvement paradigm are employees can make important contributions and are capable of making decisions about their jobs given the right training and information. One characteristic of high involvement organizations is self-managing teams. Self-managing teams have received an increasing amount of attention and research recently in the management literature. Frequently researched areas are the role of the supervisor and outcomes (group and organizational performance) of self-managing teams. One area which has not been well documented is the information teams need to execute the additional responsibilities and decisions they have in a team environment. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap in the literature.

This study used the case study method to study how five organizations share information with self-managing teams. The organizations vary in the type of industry (manufacturing and service), the scope of the self-managing team effort (new design, or “greenfield”, and redesign sites), the presence of a union, and in size. Data collection for the case studies included interviews with managers, supervisors, and team members, as well as organizational documentation, and observations. One of the outputs of this research study was detailed case descriptions of each organization. Another output of this study is a list of “design features” for information systems to support self-managing teams. These design features are characteristics of information shared with teams and represent what has worked well for the set of organizations studied.