RL Wolfe Self Directed teams

INTRODUCTION John Amasi has established self-directed teams [SDT] at his Corpus Christi plant to allow for the betterment of the product and allow for employee decision making. The use of SDT’s has been used throughout different industries with great success. John hoped to use this same approach in his plastic pipe manufacturing plant, while hoping to achieve the same results as the other industries. Problems with the self-directed teams begin to arise and John, along with plant manager Jay Winslow, knew that things needed to change. What had occurred in the Corpus Christi plant was too much empowerment for the employee. Employees were allowed to make decisions on how to improve the process and product, but they were also allowed to make decisions on such things as when to work, how much overtime to work, vacation days, and how much they would be paid. Hard line boundaries had to be drawn and employees had to follow these rules. If John didn’t do something to help him reach his goal of 95% design capacity, then the employees would continue to change things to benefit themselves while hurting the company; leading to a sense of entitlement from the employee (Collins and Garvin, 2009). Giving employees a right to decide how is improve floor level processes is great for the company, but allowing them to make decisions related to personal issues such as time off and pay only hurts the company. Boundaries are the key to improved success at the plant and must be implemented and accepted by both the employees and management for them to be effective.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION Under RL Wolfe, a $350 million dollar plastic pipe manufacturing company, John Amasi, director of Production and Engineering, wanted to implement self-directed teams [SDT] at his Corpus Christi plant. The Corpus Christi plant was purchased from Moon Plastics in 2003, retooled, and back online in 2004 with a design capacity of 2,250 tons of polyethylene pipe per year. With three plants throughout