Structure and Status in Design Teams: Implications for Design Management

From the perspective of design management, the obvious answer is that designed products derive long chains of decisions, and that different decisions made at critical points in the process result in differences in the designed products. Though this is a fairly commonplace observation, it has deep implications. It suggests that a design can be understood in terms of the decision-making process used to arrive at it, not only in the terms of the aesthetic, market, or technological factors commonly assumed to drive designs. For products designed in groups, this means the organizing structures used to facilitate coordination during the design process have a substantive effect on the content of the design. Beyond coordination, the primary intent of an organizing structure is to control how decisions are made. This means we must consider the design implications of the types of organizing structures we currently use to manage design practice. General business trends suggest a movement toward flat, low-hierarchy organizational structures that are centered around self-managing teams (Dumaine 1990; Katzenbach & Smith 1993). Anecdotal evidence suggests this is particularly true for design organizations and it has significant implications for decision making in teams. When flat organizing structures are adopted in design teams, designers must negotiate design decisions among team members, because a hierarchical, or “top-down,” approach to decisionmaking is not available. Indeed, that members of a design team negotiate decisions with one another during design projects is obvious to anyone who has performed design or observed group design process. Yet, while the fact that these product-defining negotiations occur in groups is often acknowledged, only rarely are the dynamics of the negotiation examined. A common assumption seems to be that these decision-making negotiations proceed in a reasonable if not rational manner, this being a basic premise of design-management processes, such as concurrent engineering. However, in my year-long observation of decision-making negotiations in groups in an R&D organization, I found that negotiations did not follow a pattern of obvious reason or rationality. Rather, I found the patterns and outcomes of negotiations were best explained in terms of status dynamics in the groups. This study examines these status dynamics and their effects on groups that must negotiate designs. Starting from the proposition that meetings can be viewed as status contests, I describe the nature and the content of the status currency used in one organization. I then induce a model of status dynamics that describes how an individual’s level of status might affect the behaviors he or she uses to participate in the group’s working negotiations. In the subsequent quantitative