An Automated Workforce Clustering Method for Business Process Reengineering in Research and Development Organizations

Introduction

Innovation plays a prominent role in the current turbulent economy. For innovating organizations, workforce creativity is a crucial determinant of competitiveness and productivity (Lovelace et al., 2001). Team building is a strategy for combining the creativity of employees and promoting innovation (Hoegl & Gemuenden, 2001). Innovation requires teamwork and teams need to have high levels of collaboration to synergistically combine their skills and successfully cope with the complex and dynamic nature of innovative projects (Stewart & Barrick, 2000; Hoegl & Praveen Parboteeah, 2007; Okhuysen & Eisenhardt, 2002; Seijts & Gandz, 2009; Thompson, 2003).

The ability to form effective teams to take on challenges in this turbulent environment is a source of competitive advantage for most research and development (R&D) organizations. Several approaches have been proposed for team formation in the literature. For example, the team management wheel proposed by Margerison and McCann (1991) or the team role model proposed by Belbin (1991) can be used to form balanced and complementary workgroups. Other methods include multi-functional work-force team formation (Fitzpatrick & Askin, 2005; Tseng et al., 2004), project management team formation (Wi et al., 2009a, 2009b), and task force team formation (Tavana et al., 2007). The main objective of these methods is to organize a group of individuals into a useful set of teams such that the similarity of the individual members within a team is maximized while the similarity of the individual members between different teams is minimized (Wi et al., 2009a). More specifically, the staff in R&D oriented organizations is generally structured in work units and projects, which have an enormous influence on the performance of the entire organization (Wi et al., 2009a).

Previous researchers have proposed many intuitive approaches for team formation utilizing intuition and subjective judgment from “experts” at various stages of their implementation. However, the complexities inherent in large R&D organizations have restricted the effectiveness of their use in practice. In order to achieve maximum benefits, teams have to be formed carefully and placing individuals randomly in a group and assigning them a task is not sufficient (Soller, 2001). We propose an alternative method for business process reengineering (BPR) and multi-functional team formation in R&D organizations based on group technology (GT) problems in manufacturing. GT is a methodology for organizing work into independent groups each responsible for the production of a given family of products (Burbridge, 1979). GT simply states that similar things should be done similarly. These problems are also known as the machine-part cell formation (CF) problems where parts and machines in a manufacturing process are assigned to independent cells so that the machine utilization within a cell is maximized and the between-cell movement of parts is minimized (Ahi et al., 2009; Bajestani et al., 2009; De Lit et al., 2000; James et al., 2007).