In business management, an autonomous work group is a group encouraged to manage its own work and working practices. The concept of an autonomous work group was developed by Eric Trist at the Tavistock Institute in London, England after the end of World War II. Involving the working team to decide for itself how the work should be carried out, and distributed among members.
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Definition
A. Rao, N. Thorberry and J. Weintraub define autonomous teamwork as "groups of independent workers, who regulate much of their own task behaviour around relatively whole tasks. This kind of groups are also generally allowed to select and train new members, set their own work pace, supervise most of their own activities and often trade jobs among themselves"
We can distinguish semi-autonomous and autonomous teams, the deference depends of the degree of autonomy of the group.
Nowadays, more and more companies are employing (semi)autonomous work groups, such as car’s industry, mass distribution sector and currently starts ‘up.
To succeed and be performant in its tasks a (semi)autonomous team needs:
Autonomous Teamwork and Psychological Well-being
There is an ongoing phenomenon that autonomous teamwork supposedly has a positive influence on the psychological well-being of employees.
A study conducted by two universities of Netherland focuses on the influences of the perceived group autonomy and individual autonomy, respectively on the individual tasks and psychological well-being. Through a poll conducted on employees in a supermarket chain, which targets different aspects of team work, (i.e. individual autonomy, social relationships with colleagues or even individual workload). It was found that there is no strong relationship between psychological fatigue and individual task variety, also between motivation to learn and quality of social relationships.
There is still a positive impact of the individual aspects of the work on the motivation. It shows indeed that autonomous work increases variety, decreases individual workload and overall improves the quality of social relationships.