Twentieth century management theory in today's organization - how relevant is a forty-year-old model in the contemporary context of a call center

Abstract

[Abstract]: In the search to find the solution to the ‘one best way’ to provide a conduit for contact between organizations and their customers, call centers represent a recent incarnation of the principles of scientific management developed in the first decades of the last century. This paper seeks to apply another iconic legacy of twentieth century management theory, Tuckman’s four-stage model of group development devised in 1965, to organizations which didn’t exist when the original idea was first postulated. How relevant are the ‘forming’, storming’, norming, and ‘performing’ stages of progression to an environment renowned for constant changes to group membership? In his 1977 revision of the four-stage model with Jensen, Tuckman acknowledged the limited capacity of the theory to account for transient participation in groups. This paper reports the findings of research which provides evidence that Tuckman’s model describes accurately the patterns of behaviour demonstrated by groups of newly selected call center workers completing their initial induction training in an Australian, semi-government, call center. Call centers provide a contemporary context for the application of Taylorist management principles, symbolic of practice more readily associated with the industrial revolution than with ‘modern’ organizations. Tuckman’s 1965 model has a similar resonance for call centers today.