OshKosh B'Gosh is a $365 million-plus company that designs, manufactures, sources, and sells clothes to men, women, children, and families. Founded in 1929, OshKosh B'Gosh has grown steadily over the decades, in its most recent history through several acquisitions in the 1990s. The company's principal products include dresses, blouses, and outerwear for girls and children; shirts and work clothing for boys and men; and outerwear for women. The company also operates family clothing stores.

OshKosh B'Gosh has effectively combined work teams with technology, resulting in 13 of its 14 sewing plants continuing operation in the United States. The company's international subsidiaries include locations in Germany, France, Hong Kong, the Virgin Islands, and the United Kingdom.

The company has experimented with work teams at seven of the domestic sewing plants and has been able to develop measures of effectiveness. The company has tracked unit production systems, mini sew lines, and their progressive bundle system. They found that work teams produced 30 percent more than the sew line, and when work teams were combined with unit production systems, they were even more efficient. However, OshKosh is progressing slowly with implementation of work teams to ensure their success.

SOURCE: "Competition is Child's Play for OshKosh," Daily News Record, 25 (1995): 17S.

ORGANIZATIONAL REALITY

Elite Emergency Trauma Team

Mass General is one of the world's finest teaching hospitals. About 200 patients show up at the hospital's emergency room each day, of which about one-third are admitted. A score or so of those admitted, the worst cases, end up in Mass General's trauma center. A triage nurse knows they are in big trouble because of especially traumatic, violent, often life-threatening wounds. A lot of stabbing victims and gunshot victims are rolled into the trauma center on gurneys.

Alasdair Conn, a genial Scotsman, is chief of emergency services at Mass General and presides over the trauma team. He prefers trauma team members with some outside interests, such as sculling or numismatics, that enable the team member to escape the mental rigors of the high performance work demands of the trauma center.

The trauma team consists of doctors, nurses, and technicians who work together in a seamless drama of role-interrelatedness. Highly talented and trained, the team members collaboratively address each new case, with one talking to conscious patients, another setting up an IV, another calling for a consult, and yet another examining the wound(s) and/or fracture(s). As the drama unfolds in the trauma center, one team member often takes charge at some point, plots a strategy for treatment, and guides the team in task activities. Members' adaptive personalities help maintain cohesion in the high-stress trauma center. As violence rises, so does the value of this elite team.

SOURCE: K. Labich, "Elite Teams Get the Job Done," Fortune, February 19, 1996, 90-99. © 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION

Empowerment and Change at Work

Although the concept of empowerment may be deceptively simple to understand, empowering a workforce may require dramatic change in an organization. This research is based on a study of ten organizations in banking and financial services, the food and grocery business, power and utilities, health care and medical products, television and entertainment, and information services. The keys to empowerment may seem straight-forward at first, but they can prove very hard to implement. The key steps to implementation are the formation of an information-sharing culture, the creation of autonomy through structural change, and the establishment of teams to define the new organizational hierarchy. The ten companies in this study experienced real difficulty in the transition from a bureaucratic structure to a flexible, fully empowered one. To bring about the organizational change and empowerment of the workforce required a series of structural changes over several years.

In all ten organizations, empowerment led to improved operational capabilities and renewed competitiveness. Empowerment is all about teaming with other people through sharing information and creating new structures to better use as well as to develop people's talents. Empower-ment leads to a feeling of ownership.

The study concluded that for teams to be the hierarchy of the new organizational reality, they must receive direction and training for new skills, encouragement and support for change, and gradual freedom from tight managerial control. They must evolve their own leadership and status structure, and acknowledge the real fear associated with the responsibility of this fundamental change in the organization.

SOURCE: Reprinted by permission of the publisher, from "Navigating the Journey to Empowerment," Organizational Dynamics, Spring 1995 © 1995 W.A. Randolph, American Management Association. All rights reserved.

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